An Interview with Ben Markovits

Early in Playing Days, Ben Markovits’s roman à clef based on a year he spent playing professional basketball in Germany, the narrator (also named Ben Markovits) notes that his coach reminds him of his father and his father’s friends, quick-witted, quick-handed men against whom Ben measured his uncertain progress as a young ballplayer. Assessing his new coach, he remarks: ‘What I hoped to find out from him was an answer to the old question: what do you think? Am I any good?’

The old question, at this point, is about basketball. By the end of the novel it has deepened in the consciousness of the narrator and the consideration of the reader to encompass all aspects of character. Coming to the end of his club contract, musing on how far he and his talented, hard-working teammates are from world-class excellence, he asks: ‘How many of us have the talent or skill, or in some cases the opportunity, to lead decent, loving, useful, satisfied lives?’

That’s a big philosophical jump, but one justified by the book’s subtle narrative course through matters of work, love, friendship and family; of finding one’s feet and assessing one’s place in the world. It is a central question in Markovits’s oeuvre, what, in one form or another, his characters repeatedly ask themselves and others. What does it take to be a good person, a successful person, and to be happy with one’s choices? How do we rise above failure when it occurs, pointlessness when it descends? How do we deal with the frustrations that are part of our inheritance – cultural, familial, personal?

Readers of The Rest of Our Lives, shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, will know how skilfully and subtly Markovits handles the theme of public appraisal and self-assessment. And he’s been doing it for a while – twelve novels published over the last twenty-two years, a prolific output, remarkable for its consistent quality and innovative range. As he said to me in our recent interview: ‘In Either Side of Winter, my second book, you can already see the core of what I want to write about: people with comfortable lives who aren’t necessarily as happy as they should be. (How happy should people be? I don’t know.)’ As a central character in a more recent novel says of himself at a low point: ‘There’s got to be a kind of life possible that would seem to him worth living.’

The narrative context for this overarching theme has changed as Markovits has matured. His early books, including three historical novels centred around the life of Lord Byron, were often experimental in nature and quite formal in tone. Over the last decade or so, his work has evolved to a more conversational style and a presentation of contemporary domestic life that is carefully observed, psychologically complex and powerfully convincing. But the impulse toward verisimilitude has been there from the beginning. In his twenties, Markovits told me:

I finished several drafts of a novel about the neighbourhood in Austin where I grew up. The premise was that an awkward young man, based vaguely on one of the kids next door, who had been adopted, moves into the street, and as various people try to help him out, he starts to exercise a strange spell over everyone – he puts their lives and strivings in a new light. The book wasn’t very good. I was trying to write modest realism but hadn’t figured out how to make anything happen.

Around the same time he also wrote a basketball memoir, which would eventually morph into Playing Days. Neither of these early efforts was published but they laid the groundwork for a career that has a clear arc toward mimesis – what he calls ‘modest realism’ though there is nothing modest about it: his writing is as smooth and effective as a Dirk Nowitzki fadeaway.

The Booker accolade has brought Markovits the critical attention and (let’s hope) the broader readership he has long deserved. From its opening pages, The Rest of Our Lives is compelling in its subject and assured in its execution. Part road trip novel, like John Updike’s Rabbit, Run or Richard Ford’s Be Mine, it is also about how a man responds to the challenges of midlife: Tom Layward, a law school professor in his mid-fifties, faces a failing marriage, a forced leave of absence from his job and serious health issues. His way of dealing with these problems is to drive. After leaving his home in New York and dropping his daughter off at her college in Pittsburgh, he sets off, unannounced, cross-country, stopping off to visit his younger brother, old college friends and a former girlfriend, while pondering marriage and family and toying with the idea of playing pick-up basketball games along the way and documenting them for a book. He ends up in LA, where he meets his son, visits his father’s grave and suffers a health crisis. His last destination calls to mind Saul Bellow’s wry observation in Seize the Day: ‘In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into southern California.’

There is nothing like driving across America alone to give a person time and space to think, and one of the novel’s strengths is the breadth of Tom’s inner life as he travels. His first-person thoughts are an apt vehicle for presenting the history of his marriage, his relationships with friends and family, and his denial of his alarming illness. Markovits has always been good at capturing the mental give and take of characters wrestling with the past and negotiating the future. ‘Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is,’ Tom thinks as he sips an iced tea and looks at the empty streets of Des Moines, Iowa, ‘how it has a lot of variations. Just hour by hour.’ Those variations make up the substance of his journey, as Tom talks not just to the reader but to himself and others as he drives, a device Markovits has borrowed from his own experience:

I often carry on arguments in my head, long after they’re over. And not just arguments, but conversations, where I’m trying to explain myself to certain people who for whatever reason seem to bring out this particular need for self-explanation. I think this is fairly common, so I thought I could make use of it in fiction.

The narrator of Markovits’s 2015 novel You Don’t Have to Live Like This begins the book by saying, ‘When I was younger I was never much good at telling stories’, before going on to tell a very good story indeed. The illusion of random observation that a good first-person narrative creates is not easy to achieve, and Markovits does it with aplomb. But he also likes the first-person for other reasons:

There’s something about first person that is very attractive to me, because it makes everything the narrator says or describes potentially interesting, as a mark or test of character. When I do events for The Rest of Our Lives I normally read the first couple of pages. In the opening paragraph, Tom says that because he made good money, his wife didn’t have to work, which meant that she got bored and restless and maybe even depressed. I always wonder, before I say it, how the line is going to come across – as if he were annoyed by this fact? Because he had to go to the office every day, while she was having her affair … or sympathetic, as if he was trying to understand what happened and why, from her perspective? Or some combination of the two? It’s hard to play with that kind of uncertainty in third person.

All that is true. And yet Markovits’s finest achievement is in the third person. A Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin, companion novels published almost back-to-back in 2018 and 2019, tell the story of the Essingers, a family similar to Markovits’s own: accomplished parents, the father Jewish, the mother a German Gentile; a contentious brood of grown children and their partners who love to analyse and argue; familial interest in sports, books, law and politics. Each novel takes place over several days, Weekend in August at the US Open Tennis Championships, and Christmas in the Essingers’ hometown of Austin, Texas, four months later. The novels are so closely linked, I asked Markovits about their genesis:

Originally, it was going to be one novel, in four parts. But the Weekend took so long, that I decided to split them up. In theory, I have two more novels to go – the exciting stuff was supposed to happen in the last two sections! But I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

We should all hope he does get there. There are so many reasons to love these books: they are compulsively readable, wide-ranging in their concerns, penetrating in their examination of what it means to succeed or fail – in a job, passion, relationship, family. The characters are wonderfully drawn and endlessly interesting. The sense of place is exact (in spite of having lived in London for the last thirty years, Markovits captures the diverse American landscape as well as anyone). A large part of the books’ charm and power is the flexible point of view he uses to move in and out of the many interactions as the family gathers in these very different parts of the country. The large cast of characters and the complicated skein of relationships pose significant narrative challenges that Markovits handles consummately. He is as skilled as Jonathan Franzen or Richard Russo at building scenes with a lot of crosstalk. He seamlessly shifts point of view from one character to another for purposes of drama or irony or comedy. And each character’s perspective is presented within a unique register. When the family patriarch, Bill, visits his old New York neighbourhood, the prose shades towards Roth or Bellow. When his sons are driving through Austin, the writing feels more like Updike or Ford. I’m not talking stylistic influence here, but rather the way the literal landscape and cultural context are part of the narrative shape of individual characters. Markovits elaborated on this:

It was part of my idea for the books that I didn’t want to have minor characters – they’re family novels, and I hoped to suggest something of the pressure of all those competing personalities and points of view. All the siblings and even their kids and partners needed their own things to worry about, their own plotlines and ways of thinking. I’m one of five kids and we’re all fairly similar, but that also means that the differences are what we argue about, even if we basically love and agree with each other.

The reason for the New York gathering is to watch Paul Essinger, a mid-ranking professional tennis player, compete in the US Open. Paul’s partner, Dana, is an ex-model and mother of their two-year-old son. Their disagreements over where and how to live, as well as Paul’s assessment of his relative mediocrity (he is destined to lose in the first round, and knows it), provide the emotional spine for both books, but the theme of ambition and failure is distributed throughout the family (Weekend’s epigraph is the opening five words of Anna Karenina, so we know from the start what we are in for). ‘In a long life, everything gets used,’ Paul’s writer mother, Liesel, says at one point. The same could be said of how Markovits uses the myriad details of ordinary family life to create fiction that has both the texture of daily experience and the drama and intensity of our most personal choices.

Paul’s ultimate assessment of his athletic ability – how skilled he is compared with an average person and yet how far he is from being a Federer or Nadal – is a familiar trope, recalling how the narrator of Playing Days sees himself as his year of professional competition ends. Markovits writes about tennis almost as well as he does about basketball. The nuts and bolts of stress and strategy, preparation and performance, are detailed and convincing. As wonderful as Updike’s Rabbit novels are, I’ve always felt that Rabbit’s basketball past was more of a literary conceit than a realistic part of his character. The pick-up games that begin and end the tetralogy and the conversations Rabbit has with his former coach and fellow players are well written but lack what Henry James called ‘felt life’. (Updike, incidentally, is much better on golf.) Markovits, on the other hand, gets the details right. But it is not just about verisimilitude. Nor is sport simply a metaphor. Rather, it is a lens through which his characters honestly and often painfully examine ambition and failure.

‘Sports left a deep mark on me. In high school, I played varsity basketball but rarely got off the bench – I had a strong almost daily sense of failure, more or less after every practice. I was probably better than I showed (by senior year I was six-foot-six, could dunk easily and had a decent handle and outside shot), so the failure seemed to me even at the time a failure of character – a failure to stand up for myself. Then I worked hard over the next four years to get over this character flaw, and eventually made it to a minor-league pro team… and failed again. That gap between my private sense of who I was and what I could do, and the public measurement of me in practice and games seemed an interesting thing to write about.’

More than interesting – profound. And an intriguing route to discovery of a literary method. ‘In high school English classes,’ Markovits said, ‘my teachers liked to talk about the hero’s tragic flaw – it was usually hubris, at least that’s the only one I remember. Anyway, it seemed bogus. I didn’t recognise it as a feature of anyone I knew or an explanation for how they ended up where they did.’ His professional year in Germany spent with talented, dedicated players who, with rare exception, were simple journeymen, opened up a way of looking at the world that would inform his fiction:

All of this seemed to me a useful model for how things happen and why we end up where we do: we’re just not good enough at all the things we need to be good at, in order to get what we want from our lives. So, for example, in marriage, if you’re having a fight, you need to be able to make a joke that lightens the situation without belittling it, or seeming to mock your partner, or even deprecating yourself in a way that you’ll later regret. That joke exists, and if you can come up with it, the fight goes away. But if you can’t … Anyway, it seemed more convincing to me than the idea of tragic flaws, and also a possible engine for a kind of quiet realism in fiction. Even if it’s also a dangerous way of looking at the world, which is partly what The Rest of Our Lives starts out with – Tom thinking you can measure a marriage and a life in terms of grades.

This close relationship between personal assessment and literary form strikes me as good a way as any of defining realism, at least for the age and culture we live in. And more importantly, the craft Markovits brings to his writing – the careful way he avoids the mannerisms and narcissism of autofiction and the artful expertise he has with dialogue, description, setting and character – makes him worth reading time and again. ‘I tend to be critical of novels that make big statements,’ he said. ‘I like to say that I prefer the small claims court.’ Those small claims are examined with exacting skill and technical largesse. They resonate within a form of fiction that is flexible and incisive and one that Markovits handles with confidence and control, whether writing about sports in The Sidekick or politics in You Don’t Have to Live Like This.

One of the advantages of realism, from a writer’s point of view, seems to be that things keep happening to you – the source of material keeps getting replenished. You get married, have kids, etc. Get sick … I’m conscious of the fact that writers (like basketball players) tend to rely on certain go-to moves, at the risk of sometimes becoming predictable. But maybe that’s what we want from writers: a certain mood, or a kind of character or situation, that we associate with them, and learn to recognise.

Markovits is anything but predictable except in the sense that we know that what he writes is going to be good. We, his readers, absorb his confidence and know his stories come from a life well examined and faithfully reproduced. Whether he’s writing about basketball or marriage, landscape or living room, his literary go-to moves are sure-handed and unique. And definitely major league.

Ben Markovits’s novel The Rest of Our Lives was on the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist. Starting Out, his thirteenth novel, will be published by Faber in spring 2027.