Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

A Book Review

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has an enticing and novel premise. In the late 1990s, three college kids at Harvard and MIT start a video game company. They make it, and later in the book, one of them—Sadie—will admit that their timing was serendipitous. Had they been older, video games didn’t exist, and, were they younger, the market was so competitive that no small entrant had a chance of success. You needed a team and high end graphics. They entered the industry the only moment they could.

The book itself— particularly the first 2/3rds— has all the charm of serendipity. It is fundamentally a novel about friendship— a Bildungsroman juxtaposed with the immersive creative art of video games. It elevates gaming to the realm of art; Alongside poetry and fiction and music and cooking (when done well).

Unfortunately, the last third of the book took beyond charming. It gilded the lily, and ultimately, although I enjoyed the novel, it fell short. It felt like the work of a screenwriter and not a novelist, which must be a tension in the life of Zevin who is both.

***spoilers to follow**

In the fantasy world Maplewood, the team — Sam, Marx and Sadie— permit gay marriage before America had embraced it. I remember distinctly the rapidly changing attitudes from 2000-2012 on gay marriage. I came of age in this time, and watched even as young progressives moved from intolerant to embracing.

Yet, it struck me as forced to imagine that a man whose wife left him b/c she discovered she was a lesbian on Maplewood would blame the creator and come to their office with guns. Marx’s death felt entirely forced, and, in a sense, convenient. It’s easy to kill off a love interest— it is much harder to reconcile with what it means to love two people; how love can shift and grow— how you can be pulled in two directions.

The story that doesn’t exist is what would happen if Sadie came to realize that she loved two men. Of course, other novelists have sought out this material— rich and challenging to course. Instead, however, Marx is gone and Sam becomes an asshole.

Sam, of course, is less and less lovable as time goes on— constantly alternating between bellyaching about his own timidity and his self-righteousness that he never made a move because creating art is so valuable (of course, this is not true). It hardly feels like Sadie faces a dilemma. The book wound up a love triangle, but ended with two parallel lines.

Dov, of course, is flat and cliche. His only charm is that he once made a gorgeous video game, but this is told to the reader, and we see no element of his charm. His use of BDSM seems trite, and Sadie’s acceptance of it a heavy handed way to show her lack of self esteem. Why not make him a richer character? Why not show the reader why she fell for him (rather than merely tells us)?

The moments of the book that are most gorgeous are the joy of building something that you hope people will love. I am no expert on this, but I do know what it is like to build something, working silently for days on end, hoping that one day it will delight your audience. In my youth it was original songs on guitar, and now it tends to be books. It is a transcendent and joyous experience to try to make something that you hope will inform, challenge, or delight others, and the pleasure and bonds that comes from that creation are unsurpassed.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow reminds me of those experience.

The only line I flagged in the book is this, “There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”

Indeed. The charm of making art is to do it even when you aren’t ready to. That was advice I gave someone with promise recently, and that's the promise of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It's a shame that the characters and plot didn't match up to the book’s ambition ambition. Nevertheless, it was a fast and engaging read. Began with a bang, ended with a whimper.