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Tom is dropping off his daughter, Miri, for her freshman year at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Twelve years ago, Tom's wife, Amy, confessed to an affair and asked that the couple stay together until Miri left home. As he's done with pretty much everything his entire life, Tom acquiesced. By now, his and Amy's marriage has slowly disintegrated to the point where they no longer communicate, even about important things, such as Tom losing his job. Without any forethought, Tom finds himself leaving Miri's campus and setting off on a cross-country drive, presumably wandering towards his older son, Michael, in Los Angeles. Tom tells his story in first person, and the book consists of his narrative about his experiences and memories. While he fears his weary resignation and declining health have made him tedious, readers will find themselves caring deeply about him. Tom is brutally honest, stopping his journey more than once because he fears he's created a wrong impression. This well-crafted, introspective, and character-driven novel slowly insinuates itself, creating an affecting, memorable read.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A man facing the empty-nest phase of a disappointing marriage drops his daughter at college and hits the road. Published in the U.K. earlier this year, now shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Markovits’ 12th novel establishes the unstudied and confiding voice that carries it so compellingly forward in the first sentence: “When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.” As the story unfolds, this voice often addresses the reader directly, saying things like, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound about it the way I probably sound,” and “I should probably say a word about our friendship,” and so forth, increasing the intimate effect. For the sake of his kids—there’s also a daughter, then 6—Tom Layward made a deal with himself that he’d stay in the marriage until they left home. The book opens at that point, 12 years later. “What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” Other things are also going poorly: Tom, a law professor on leave from his university after counseling the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism, has also refused to add his pronouns to his email signature. Markovits, who was born in Texas, played pro basketball in Germany, and now lives in London, develops this tricky aspect of the situation in a notably nuanced way, as part of the complexity of Tom’s character rather than as a dive into the breach of the culture wars. Tom is also suffering from undiagnosed but serious-seeming health symptoms, which he vaguely ascribes to long Covid. When an argument between his wife, Amy, and daughter, Miri, erupts on the day they are to take her to campus, Amy stays home in suburban New York. And without ever actually deciding to, Tom ends up on a cross-country road trip, visiting an old basketball teammate, an ex-lover, his brother, and ultimately his son on the West Coast. Though Markovits has never been big on plot, the reader’s sense that this is all leading up to something is not wrong. This controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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An unhappy family man takes stock of his life in Markovits’s superb road novel (after The Sidekick), which was recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. At 55, New York City law professor Tom Layward decides to make good on a promise he made to himself 12 years earlier: to leave his wife, Amy, once they became empty nesters. Back then, she confessed to her affair with a man from their synagogue. Now, after dropping off their daughter, Miri, at college in Pittsburgh, Tom, who’s also dealing with long Covid, continues west, having nowhere to go since he was placed on leave for refusing to sign department emails with his preferred pronouns. Along the way, he reunites with family, friends, and exes, and entertains an opportunity to consult on a dubious case alleging white discrimination in the NBA. Unlike in other fiction about contemporary America’s culture wars and generational divides, Markovits endows his hero not with righteous grievance but with tenderness and wry self-reflection, as Tom gamely tries to see himself through others’ eyes (“Angry white male,” Miri calls him, whenever she thinks he’s “trying to be controversial”) and contends with his mortality. What starts as an understated chronicle of wanderlust swells to something more powerful and permanent. Agent: Barry Harbaugh, WLA. (Dec.)