Road trip

In a break from his tetralogy about the Essinger family, and following on from The Sidekick (a kind of Humboldt’s Gift with basketball), Ben Markovits now takes us on a road trip across America. The Rest of Our Lives explores marital breakdown, betrayal, the empty nest and a myriad mid-life malaises, including life-threatening illness. It’s quietly enthralling and full of the small epiphanies that more maximalist writers wouldn’t deem worthy of notice. When Amy Lanyard has an affair with ‘a guy called Zach Zirsky whom she knew from synagogue’, her husband Tom, a legal professor, vows to leave the marriage after their daughter Miri turns 18.

Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is recounting a road trip that she and her husband Lewis took through the American Southwest in 2018 – while a deadly fire was sweeping through northern California. The trip was bookended by disasters you could describe as closer to home: before it, Lewis’s mother died; after it, Lewis disappeared. By combing through their time in and out of the ‘climate-controlled interior of the car’, Eloise tries to figure out what happened. The journey is part business, part pleasure. Eloise is researching her dissertation on the Colorado River.

Sometimes a novel’s means are so strange, however compelling its final effect on the reader, that a straightforward account of it will be most helpful. I’ve read, or part-read, this novel three times now. On the first reading I gave up, shaking my head. On the second I got to the end, but thought it absurdly wilful, self-absorbed and idiosyncratic to the point of whimsy. The third reading – something, after all, must have drawn me back – exerted an appalling power, and I emerged shaken, troubled, but also consoled. Take your pick. This is a book that is going to divide people, and one that can look very different to the same reader in different lights. Finn visits the cemetery – and there is Lily.

Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you need to have read Less, Greer’s Pulitzer-winning first outing for his creation, to appreciate this slighter but equally charming sequel. That’s no hardship. Less was hilarious and humane: a hymn to second acts. In it, Arthur Less – a tentative, faded Battenberg blond-and-pink man, around whom embarrassments and misunderstandings coalesce – scuttled across the world to avoid facing his 50th birthday and the wedding of his long-time lover Freddy to someone else, both imminent. In Less is Lost, Arthur has a stranger and scarier destination for a West Coast homosexual: America’s heartlands.

A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This is a road trip like no other: Paddy, deracinated, footloose, divorced, taking on a temporary job for reasons that become clear later; and daughter Kitty, spiky, provocative, shaved head, grubby jeans and sweater, wrapped in an old mink coat she’s pinched from her grandmother. Occasionally she rewards her father with an ambiguous affectionate response as their edgy banter veers in and out of dangerous territory: the minefield of parenthood. The narrative is fractured; nothing told chronologically, the surface deliberately throw-away — skewed punctuation, sentences left hanging.