The Rest of Our Lives: Benjamin Markovits in Conversation
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You may not remember this, but the first time we spoke, you said something to the effect of ‘all good writing should be paraphrasable’. So, quite cruelly, I have to ask – could you paraphrase what your novel The Rest of Our Lives is about?
I have the glib answer I give when people ask me what the story is about. I wanted to write about a guy who realises that he’s been trying to get through the rest of his life unscathed, without making any big mistakes, without doing anything wrong.
His wife had an affair when the kids were small, he didn’t feel like that was his fault. He’s been suspended at work, he doesn’t feel like that’s his fault. His health is declining in ways that he can’t understand, he doesn’t feel like that’s his fault. His kids are leaving home. And he realises that he’s been trying to live without acting on any positive wants, he’s just been trying to get through. Part of the story is about his realisation that that’s not a way to live. Is that paraphrased enough?
This character, Tom, who is defined by inaction, then makes a grand, radical act. Some people will immediately think of Updike and the Rabbit books. Updike is even referenced in the PhD Tom abandons as a graduate student. Am I right in saying that influence was conscious? What did you take specifically from Updike’s work?
The fact that I made Tom work on a PhD about mid-century American writing, including Updike, meant that I knew that there was a parallel there. But Updike doesn’t write very paraphrasably. He writes these gem-like beautiful sentences. Rabbit, Run is also not written in the first person. I don’t think it really could be written in the first person, because part of the game that Updike is playing is that the prose that inhabits Rabbit’s viewpoint is really beautiful, literary and perceptive but it wouldn’t ever really be uttered by Rabbit. Whereas it was more important for me to get a voice for Tom that allowed him to say all the stuff that I might want to say. He’s probably closer to me in background too. I mean, Updike’s background is a funny one, isn’t it? On the one hand, he’s so closely associated with the New Yorker and Harvard and all of that, but he saw himself as more of an outsider and a country boy, so he’s closer to Harry Angstrom than the reputation might suggest.
The other difference is that Rabbit doesn’t really get anywhere. He drives away, and then has to turn around. Although in some ways he gets much further than Tom does, because Tom, even though he’s running away, still more or less tries to get through unscathed.
Not to give too much of a spoiler, but the last line is literally something like, ‘shall we go home?’. There’s not a sense of dramatic change in his outlook, in the most outward sense.
Yes, and even when he’s on the road, he spends a lot of time thinking about his wife. He has this conversation with her, in which she says to him, quite reasonably, ‘you seem very cold toward me’. But in response he reasonably says that ‘a lack of sympathy for you has never been a problem for me’, because actually he spends a lot of time thinking through why her life turned out the way it did, and the extent to which he was complicit in it.
I like these moments in people’s lives when they’re both clearly right and clearly wrong at the same time.
You asked me what the book was about earlier, and my glib answer was that it’s about a guy whose wife had an affair when the kids were small, and he makes a deal with himself that when his youngest leaves for college, he can walk out on the marriage. But the reason that’s not quite right is that he does tell himself that in the aftermath of the affair, but ten years have passed, and part of what he finds awkward and embarrassing about it is that he doesn’t know, even in his own head, what the status of that arrangement that he made with himself is.
There’s a moment where he describes driving through this highway town and then he looks at the road signs towards Akron, or wherever, then just keeps going—
And that was important to me because I didn’t want to make him a total jerk. It was better if he were acting on an impulse that he himself didn’t understand.
One thing I really like about Rabbit, Run is the way he leaves. I don’t know if you remember, but it’s really carefully and skilfully done. He doesn’t set out to run away. He’s got this little dilemma where his wife is drunk and pregnant and has left their son at his mom’s house, but the car is at her mom’s house, and he’s got to decide where he’s going to go first. And he really doesn’t want to deal with his mother-in-law. But he’s also a little pissed off that his mom is having to look after the kid while his wife gets drunk, and so all of these factors play into it. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do first, and then suddenly he just takes off without having premeditated it. Tom does something similar.
The other thing about the Rabbit books is that they are overtly political, they almost act as a ‘state of the nation’ for America across three decades. Were you trying to account for a current political moment in this book?
Probably, I was. I hesitate to say that because it’s not like I think I have any great insight into the state of America. But it is a feature of the book. The narrator has been given leave from his job. He’s a law professor and he teaches a class on hate crime, and some students accused him of saying racist things in the class. In earlier drafts, I actually went into some detail about what they accused him of saying and I cut those partly because I realised that, in itself, has become a trope. The thing that the white guy says that gets him into trouble, which he doesn’t think should, is now in itself one of those hoops that certain novels have to jump through.
But he does run into a lot of old buddies from grad school, from college. White guys whose lives are pretty good, who feel like they’ve been pushed from the centre. That is a part of a picture of America: these ageing white guys complaining about their lot. And I am interested in that kind of story because it’s one of those that contains an internal contradiction. On the one hand, Tom is right – he probably shouldn’t have been suspended at work. On the other hand, he’s also totally wrong if he thinks that America has done him hard – he’s got a really good life. I like these moments in people’s lives when they’re both clearly right and clearly wrong at the same time.
You can’t write about American basketball if you’re not going to write about race.
At one point, Tom says: ‘You reach a certain age and realise the things that everybody you knew and liked agreed on—nobody agrees with you anymore on those things.’
Yes, I don’t know if you feel that already. I mean, when you’re dealing with younger writers coming up, do you feel like there’s a generational gap?
I hope not yet. But I think there’s also more of an impulse in my generation to work to overcorrect that, to try to relate to other people in a way that older generations didn’t. Did it ever worry you to write about these subjects?
Well, when I’m writing it’s just me alone in a room with a computer. It doesn’t really worry me, right? I do tend to write these stories in the first person because it feels to me like that ironises whatever I’m saying. Obviously, there are people in America who have these feelings and it doesn’t mean they’re total jerks, but if you give them the voice directly, I don’t have to comment on whatever I think about it.
The author’s get out of jail free card. I want to ask about the NBA subplot. Todd Gimell is a white basketball player who believes, among other things, that the NBA structurally discriminates against white people?
Yes, I would say he’s a doofus.
What you might call in modern parlance an ‘edgelord’, someone who wants to take on opinions that are pushing the boundaries, almost for their own sake.
I have not heard that word.
There you go. Edgelord. The topic of race comes up a lot in your novels. In The Sidekick, in You Don’t Have to Live Like This too. What keeps drawing you back to the subject?
Well, you can’t write about American basketball if you’re not going to write about race. You just have to. When I was a kid in Texas in 1984 playing junior high school basketball, it had only really been something like 15 years since school sports in Texas had been integrated. It was so much more recent than a reasonable person would expect. I say reasonable but maybe it’s exactly what you should expect, because that’s what America is like, and that’s certainly what Texas was and is like. But anyway, I was conscious, even as a 14 year old, of really uncomfortable things around race that would come up when I was playing.
So how does that get turned into this character of Todd Gimell?
Part of the point of Todd Gimell in the book is that he puts into perspective all the whiny feelings that Tom and his friends have had, which are couched in much more reasonable terms. At the end of the novel, he’s got to reluctantly deal with this guy, Todd, because he’s made a promise to a friend of his. And then he sits down and talks with him, and he thinks, what the hell am I getting into here? The point of Todd was to show such an extreme view of the lingering complaints that Tom has been making and hearing all through the book that scares him straight.
As they’re speaking he hears his daughter’s voice saying ‘angry white male’, right?
Yes, his daughter sarcastically says to him, ‘angry white male’, whenever he tries to be a provocateur. And part of the point is that he’s actually quite a patient and decent father. So when she says that she’s teasing him, it’s not like she’s actually dismissing him as the angry white male. It’s much more intimate and affectionate. But again, I wanted to complicate it a little bit, because his reaction to Todd Gimell is to return to the sense of himself as somebody who just wants to get through unscathed, because while he’s listening to this crazy idiot rant about the way America has enslaved white people, Tom’s reaction itself is a kind of giving up, like ‘I’m done, I’m out, I’m not fighting for people like this’.
Is that the philosophy of the novel – it’s best to live a quiet life, to get through unscathed?
Yes, but the reason I want to write novels rather than philosophy is that I want whatever point the novel makes to have a kind of undertone of disagreement with itself. And so to the extent that that is the realisation he comes to, I feel like we should be a little uncomfortable with it.
Onto basketball itself then, this is now a trilogy of books you’ve written about basketball, or is it four?
There’s a young adult book too. Then there’s Playing Days, The Sidekick. I mean, in this one the basketball is pretty light touch, but it is a basketball novel, I guess.
Do you think there is something unique about basketball’s structure that lends itself to drama? Or is it simply that you like it and know it well enough to write about convincingly?
I think probably both. I would say that I have – if I’m being generous to myself – a second rate knowledge of basketball. I wasn’t that good. There’s a world of people who know much more than I do about basketball. But compared to other things I know stuff about, I know a lot about basketball. And I did have interesting first-hand experience playing against Dirk Nowitzki in a minor league in Germany. So I write about it because I know it, but also because I think it is a really interesting test of character. Athletes, all the time, have to make these decisions about their limits, who they are, how they’re going to come to terms with that, how they’re going to fit into a dynamic, how to decide when to give up. These are really interesting questions. Writing about basketball gives me a plot and action and character associated with those questions. Instead of just talking abstractly about people deciding what their limits are, I can go into specifics and make it live.
It seems nicer to write about people who feel like they’re failures than to write about people who just think they’re the greatest.
You’ve written that the fundamental difference between writers and athletes is how they experience failure. Most of your protagonists are in some way failures. Why do you think that is?
I would say that I write about successful failures. People who have had some degree of success but still perceive their life or measure it partly by failure. I just think that’s what people are like. I think it is a part of the human experience, no matter how moderately or modestly successful you are, you put yourself in the context of the things that you didn’t do and the ways that you failed. And that is interesting to me. It seems nicer to write about people who feel like they’re failures than to write about people who just think they’re the greatest.
The epigraph to your novel Playing Days, tells us, from Byron, that ‘pure invention is but the talent of a liar’ – how much of this novel comes from your own life? It’s something of a road-trip novel, so did you take a similar journey as research?
Well, first of all, the medical stuff that Tom suffers from, I suffered from. And many of the physical things that happened to Tom actually happened to me – the passing out in a hotel, the turning blue in a swimming pool, all those sorts of things happened to me. And like Tom, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The big difference, of course, is that Tom was running away from his family. But in my case, we did go on a big road trip, but I was with my family. Partly because I really wanted to show my kids America, but also because I knew I was writing this book about a guy who was driving across the country and I wanted some first-hand stuff to draw on.
You’ve lived in the UK for a long time now. 20 years is it?
25 years? About five or six years as a kid here too, so it’s close to 30 years now.
So you’re half-German, half-American, Jewish, have lived in the UK for 30 years, but still, quite outwardly, present as an American. Where do you actually feel at home?
I feel pretty at home in London, but the answer is probably I don’t feel totally at home anywhere. What’s happening in America now, it’s the kind of political weather that nobody can live in and not get wet from. So to some extent, if you’re living in America, you’re just shaped by something that I’m not totally shaped by here. I see my siblings go through it. My parents too. But the fact that I live in England means that my experience of the last eight years in America hasn’t happened to me in the same way.
Also, I’m really conscious that in England, the small talk I want to make is not really English small talk. I want to talk about basketball.
The other element of that is Jewishness, which appears in this novel through Tom’s outsider observations of Amy’s relationship with the synagogue. How does that identity factor into your writing?
I think it’s been really important to me, partly because a lot of the writers that I started reading in my 20s were Jewish American, writers like Bellow and Roth. They meant a lot to me. Also, my Mom is German and Christian, and she came from a sort of upper middle-class background where they had old editions of Schiller in the family, so I associated being literary with my mother’s side of the family. But then I got to my 20s and started writing fiction and realised that my Dad’s experience as a Jewish kid in America was probably richer for my purposes than what I could draw from my Mom’s culture.
Bellow strikes me as the most powerful prose writer that I’ve ever encountered.
I was bar mitzvahed in Texas, where there were fewer Jews on the ground. But I felt Jewish. I guess what I’m saying is that Jewishness felt like another way in which I was an outsider, whereas it’s possible if I was brought up in New York, it wouldn’t have felt like that at all. But in Texas, it just felt like another kind of outsider status, like being German, it was just another way that I felt like I was on the periphery of things.
If you’ll allow me to pay you a compliment – I find you the kind of writer who makes me reach for a pen, not necessarily for style or theatrics, but for moments of insight. You have a way of distilling human interactions – the justifications we make, the quiet motivations we’re not always conscious of. So which writer do you find yourself underlining the most?
I tend not to read with a pen, unless I have to. But Bellow – every page has a dozen things on it that seem astonishingly well put to me. In boxing, they sometimes talk about the ‘pound for pound’ rankings. Pound for pound, Bellow strikes me as the most powerful prose writer that I’ve ever encountered.
And now actually, I’m rereading Independence Day, the Richard Ford book. He’s amazing too. Each paragraph, each sentence has like a dozen different registers and cliches and idioms that he’s playing with.
To finish, I wanted to ask some shorter questions on both writing and basketball –for the benefit of those handful of London Magazine readers who share both our interests. First, is there a novelist you’ve read more than any other?
Bellow. Or Roth, probably.
And a poet?
Byron.
Favourite basketball player when you were growing up?
I mean, obviously, Michael Jordan, but loving Michael Jordan is a bit like loving Shakespeare. It doesn’t count. It doesn’t say anything. I really liked Latrell Sprewell?
That’s quite a deep cut.
I liked athletic swingmen, basically six foot six guards, or forward types, because that’s what I wanted to be.
What about your favourite player to watch right now?
Before we started talking, I was just watching Steph Curry’s third quarter against the Orlando Magic, which I will go back to as soon as I get a break. I love watching Steph Curry.
How many threes did he end up with last night? 12 for 19 or something like that?
Yeah, it’s great how we think in those numbers, isn’t it? I could still recall some of the Jordan box scores. They’re just burnt into you.
What’s the biggest thing Americans don’t understand about writing in the UK?
Oh, that’s interesting. What do you think it is?
I think Americans are comfortable talking about their writing very seriously. In the UK, people look at you suspiciously if you speak in a certain way about your craft.
Yeah, that’s not just for writers. I think there’s a reaction to the way educated Americans speak self-consciously, even self-awarely, about their importance. And even if they’re not saying anything wrong, just the fact that they’ll do it in articulate, complete sentences when they should be a little bit more hesitant and stumbling can wind English people up.
In England you have to go through the hoops of degrading yourself before you acknowledge your own importance.
That’s interesting. It feels to me, especially now, like America becomes more and more anglophile every year. They’re obsessed with the Premier League which, when I was a kid, just didn’t exist. You couldn’t watch the games. Nobody followed it. Even things like Downton Abbey and The Crown. There’s a kind of Englishness that Americans have always been really drawn to, but it just feels like it’s getting bigger and bigger.
So what don’t we understand about American writing?
I just think America is so big and so various that I’m immediately suspicious of any statement that begins with ‘America is like X’. I grew up in Austin, Texas. New York felt several countries away from me, and I had no interest in New York or the East Coast because the culture gap seemed just too wide. And still, I feel much more at home in Texas than I would on the East Coast. It’s just a very large country, and occasionally you see someone on the news commenting on Trump in admiring tones, held up as an example of a certain kind of American, which it obviously is, but there’s just so much variety that I’m suspicious of any big statements about America.
Final question – there is, famously, an Authors’ Cricket Club, whose members have included Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne. Would you join an Authors’ Basketball Team, and who would be in our starting five?
I would love to. I’ve played ball with some writers before. Somebody was telling me of another guy who played pro in Germany who’s just published a book. I can’t remember his name. Truth is, I don’t know that I can really compete in the way I would want to be able to compete anymore. I could play author’s H-O-R-S-E or something like that. But when I was growing up baseball was the literary sport. Writers obsessed about baseball, not basketball.
It’s the same thing with cricket being seen as ‘the literary sport’ in the UK, not football.
I think it probably helps writers to have a sport in which you can still pretend that maybe you could have been good. It’s hard to do that with basketball, very quickly you realise that these people, the people you’re playing against, are in a physical league that’s totally unlike anything you can match. It’s harder to be deluded. But I can imagine, as a schoolboy cricketer who becomes a writer, you can say ‘on my day I could play a few nice shots’.
It relates to our conversation earlier about failure. If you come up against someone who is considerably better at basketball than you, you will just lose. There is no ‘on your day’. There’s something all-consuming about your inferiority.
Yes, it’s a hard world. Writing is much better.
I agree. Thank you Ben.
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Image credit: Barney Cokeliss.
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He has written eleven novels and published stories, essays and reviews in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and other publications. In 2013, he was named by Granta to their list of best British novelists under forty. In 2015, his novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction. He lives in London and teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.
Jamie Cameron was born in Swansea, Wales, and grew up in the Midlands. He is the Managing Editor of The London Magazine.
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