Ben Markovits’s 12th novel opens with a confession. Its narrator, Tom Layward, a law professor, husband and father, tells us: “When our son was 12 years old, my wife had an affair…” Tom makes a private pact to endure his marriage only until their six-year-old daughter, Miriam, leaves for college. It is a quiet, bitter calculus, the sort of grimly rationalised fatalism that pervades the book. “What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage,” Tom reflects, “which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” Markovits is an artist of such scorching recognitions – wry, unsentimental summations that make you wince at their truth.
Then, with the turn of a paragraph, 12 years evaporate. Miriam is 18, the family is summering at her mother’s parents’ house in Cape Cod, and Tom’s long-planned departure hangs over the novel like an unbroken storm. Markovits is superb at conjuring the temperature of a failing marriage – not through eruptions, but through the long accumulation of slights, hesitations and rehearsed hostilities. Tom’s wife, Amy, is masterfully drawn: brittle, commanding, a woman who has long since learned the tactical advantages of exasperation. The novel’s brilliance lies in how it refuses to reduce her to an antagonist – because, of course, Tom is just as complicit.
