Read an extract from Part III of Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, as Tom Layward reaches LA on his road trip.

At the restaurant, Michael and his friends were already sitting down at a long wooden bar. I was the last to arrive. Red banners hung from the ceiling, the smell of chilies caught in my throat. My son had saved a chair next to him but he stood up to give me a hug before introducing me. I held him longer than he wanted me to. But it was too loud to really talk, there were too many people. For the last two years, my dinner companions had been Miri and Amy and nobody else; and now I was going out every night in large groups.

On my right-hand side was a pretty girl. Girl is wrong, I couldn’t tell how old she was. Michael had deliberately put me between the two of them, but I couldn’t talk to both at once. I had to turn one way or the other.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t catch your name.”

So she spelled it out for me: B-E-T-J-E. “It’s Dutch,” she said. “People call me Betcha, but that’s not how you say it, so I tell them to call me Betty.”

“What does Michael call you?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“Are you the vet?” I asked.

Sitting down, she had quite a tall person’s presence—and like a movie star, a head that seemed just a little too big for her body. But she was very pretty. After the meal, when she stood up, I realized she was only about five-two.

“Who told you that?”

“My daughter. Michael told her you have a hinterland.”

“I wonder what he means by that,” she said.

“I think he means anybody who ever had a real job.”

“What?” she said.

“Somebody who had a job.”

There was a time-lag in the conversation, because of the noise. You had to repeat yourself, but it meant people sometimes followed their own train of thought.

“I was a vet but didn’t like it. I just liked animals but didn’t want to cut them up. A lot of what you end up doing is not really necessary, but you have to do it if you want to make money. The whole business is paid for by insurance. Anyway, I quit. It was just one of those ideas you have as a girl, about what you want to do with your life; in my case, I let it go on too long.”

She used to live in Twin Bridges, Montana. Which was another one of those ideas . . . She worked for this practice off Route 287. There were mountains all around, there were wheat fields, but there weren’t a lot of men. “Well, I had a bad experience. That’s why I moved there, to have experiences. But I didn’t like that much either.”

“Maybe this is what he means by a hinterland.”

“Eventually I decided, you need to get a little closer to where the action is. So I applied to grad school . . . in philosophy.”

Later she said, “Michael thinks I’m something that I’m not.”

We were having this conversation with him on the other side of me, but I don’t think he could hear. I could barely hear her myself and had to lean over, with my elbow on the bar and my head down.

“What’s that?”

“A serious person, at least, that’s what he wants me to be.”

“What are you working on?”

“Non-human consciousness. But nobody’s interested, all the money right now is in AI. But there’s actually a lot of overlap.”

I tried to ask her more but it was too loud. You couldn’t have a technical discussion. And I wanted to talk to Michael, too; I was aware that he was very aware of our conversation. Meanwhile, the food kept coming, in small metal bowls. Chicken wings, grilled Spam, some kind of corn cheese. We drank a sparking rice wine, which tasted a little like hibiscus tea. He said, “How are you doing,” and I said, “I’m very happy to be here, I’m happy to see you.” And he said, “No, what are you doing here, why are you here.”

“I don’t know, Michael. I can’t talk about it here, you have to shout.”

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me, not reproachfully, but with his reserved-judgment face. It was easier to talk to Betty. There were about eight of us in a row, all of them philosophers. But I didn’t really talk to anyone else. Afterward, somebody suggested karaoke. There was a place called Brass Monkey you could walk to. I said to Michael, “If it’s possible, I’d like to go to bed. I’ve been on the road since breakfast, it’s been a long day.”

Betty wanted to go, though. So they had a complicated conversation. He said, “Are you going?” And she said, “That’s the plan.”

We were outside the restaurant now, standing on Sixth Street in the rough warm traffic-flavored evening air. It was easier to talk. Betty had on black leggings and Nike running shoes, with a neon yellow swoosh; she wore an oversized men’s shirt.

“Do you want me to come too?” he asked.

“I thought your dad wanted to go to bed.”

“I can give him the keys.”

“You should see your dad.”

“I’ll see him in the morning . . . I’m just saying, if you want me to come too, I don’t think he’d care.”

“It’s fine, I don’t mind. There are a lot of people going.”

“I want you to . . . I’d like you guys to spend some time.”

“How long is he staying for?”

“I don’t know, he doesn’t know.”

“Is he here tomorrow?”

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said.

“Do you want to go to the beach?”

“I was hoping to take Michael to see his grandfather’s grave.”

“Where’s that?”

“Newport Beach. I don’t know how far that is.”

“About an hour away,” Betty said. “What about tomorrow night?”

“I’m supposed to work tomorrow night.” (Michael had a job at a restaurant in West Hollywood, which I didn’t know about.)
“What time’s your shift?”

“It starts at five.”

“So we can hang out in the afternoon. Let’s have lunch at Annenberg. We can go swimming afterward.”

“I’m not sure my father wants to go swimming.”

“I’m happy to do whatever you want to do.”

“Great,” Betty said. “It’s a date.” But she was saying it to both of us. They all walked off in a gang along Sixth Street, and Michael and I went to our separate cars.

It was a short drive to his apartment on Duane Street, opposite the dog park. There were a lot of apartment buildings around there, in various styles, but all of them fairly modern. Michael’s looked like an ocean liner. I rang the buzzer and he let me in, and I walked up the concrete stairwell, carrying my backpack. Thinking, every night, you’re sleeping somewhere new—not happily or sadly, but just because it was a fact.

“You’re growing a beard,” he said, when he opened the door.

“Well, I’m trying to make myself more resistible to women.”

“How’s that working out?”

“Not well.”

“Ha ha,” he said. “How long have you been saving that one up?”

“About three thousand miles. When I left the house, I didn’t bring my shaving things. I didn’t know how long I would be gone.”

Michael had a second-floor unit, with a balcony overlooking Silver Lake Boulevard. I had never been to his place before. It was very simple, but he had Naftali taste; there was an old rug on the floor, and one of those Eames leather recliners in the window. He had made a bookcase out of bricks and boards, painted gray. But it was also the apartment of someone who lived alone and was slowly collecting a few nice things to carry with him to his next apartment.

It was after eleven; he offered me a drink, but I just wanted to go to bed. Michael insisted I take his room. He said he wanted to do a little work anyway.

“Where are you going to sleep?” I said.

“I’ve got a very expensive air mattress. But sometimes I sleep on the recliner anyway.”

“Come on, Michael. I don’t want to kick you out.”

“It’s fine, I really don’t mind. But just . . . this can’t be like a permanent arrangement.”

“Of course not.”

He let me use the bathroom first; I borrowed his toothpaste. “The sheets are clean,” he said. “I changed them this morning.” He gave me a towel and I washed my face.

“Thank you, son. By the way, I liked the look of Betty.”

“Me too,” he said. “But seriously, Dad . . . How long do you plan to be in town?”

“I’ve kind of gone beyond plans at the moment.”

“Well, we can talk in the morning.”

His bedroom was very tidy. (Even as a teenager he used to line up the pencils on his desk; you had to be careful if you touched anything, he always knew.) There was a ficus under the window, in a large terra-cotta pot, and a stack of New Yorkers on his bedside table. The mattress was on the hard side and it took me a while to fall asleep. I could see the light from the living room under the door, and later, much later, heard him talking quietly to someone on the phone. It was the . . . I don’t know how to describe it, the sharpest taste I’d had in years of what it feels like to be young.

The Rest of Our Lives is out now in paperback and is available in ebook and audio.

The winner of the Booker Prize 2025 will be announced on 10 November. Find out more about Booker Prize-winning books published by Faber.

The Rest of Our Lives: Read the Reviews

Tom, like Markovits, was a talented basketball player in his youth, and some of the novel’s transcendent moments happen at pick-up games on courts he drops in on. Playing alongside an old friend, they turn up the heat on their opponents and Tom feels his powers return for a brief moment. “You forget what it’s like to play with somebody who really knows what he’s doing,” he reflects. “The world just opens up.”

Markovits, too, really knows what he’s doing. And it would be nice to think that the brilliant and unflashy naturalism of his novel will win many readers.

Markovits excels at family relationships: the things said and left unsaid; the weight of experience that forms character; and the ways in which families love each other, even as their members find each other irritating.