The Rest Of Our Lives - Ben Markovits (DNF)
DNF at 30%
My sixth read for the Booker Longlist, and my first DNF. Early reviews of this indicated that it's something of a sports novel, and I've enjoyed the sports books on the Booker lists in recent years (Western Lane and Headshot), so that plus the fact that this made it onto the shortlist meant that I went into it with high hopes.
Unfortunately it wasn't to be. The narrator's jaded, disaffected, disinterested tone put me off from the first few pages, and the book never managed to recover from that. I think I'm approaching a point where I've read enough books from the point of view of asshole men who think everyone else is the problem. I'm also, perhaps, a little too tired of living in a media culture of endless transphobia to see any merit in using jokes about pronouns in email signatures as a way of developing character. It just feels lazy and obvious at this point.
So I didn't care for the narrator - which is perhaps the point - but I also didn't care for the style of storytelling here. It's rambling and aimless, something of an internal monologue that just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere in particular. I gave it until the end of the first of the three long chapters that make up this book, read a few pages of the second section, and decided I had better things to do with my time than continue.
I still haven't written a review of Seascraper, which is a stunning piece of fiction, but I'm astonished that it lost out on a place on the Booker shortlist to this.