Chris’s Pick
December, 2022
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Knopf Publishing Group, July 5, 2022
Gabrielle Zevin, author of the also excellent The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, has written a book about video-game creation, a subject far removed from anything I would normally be drawn to. Yet, this book perfectly epitomizes the idea that whatever its subject, when a novel is powerful enough it can transport readers deep into worlds not their own. And that is exciting to me.
I think that people (are surprised) that they can connect with the story about video games as much as they have… but on some level, I think we’re all playing video games all the time. Look at something like Instagram, or any social media…., they have a reward system, a currency system based on ‘likes,’ but they’re very much games. –Gabrielle Zevin interview
We meet Sam and Sadie as eleven-year-olds in a children’s hospital game room; Sadie there because her sister has cancer; Sam recovering from a horrific car accident that has killed his mother and left him with a crushed foot and a refusal to speak. When Sadie sits down to play the Mario video game with Sam, he slowly finds his voice with her.
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt…’There is no more intimate act than play. (Sam)
Some years later, they meet up again as college students in Cambridge, he a scholarship student at Harvard, she at MIT –one of a small handful of women in her program.
They discover their continued mutual interest in video games and determine to create one of their own. With many of their influences drawn from art and literature the two finally produce ‘Ichigo’ inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai’s painting The Great Wave at Kanagawa. The storyline about a child trying to find its way home, the game becomes a blockbuster.
With the book’s title borrowed from the lamenting Macbeth soliloquy about the brevity and meaninglessness of life, Zevin flips the lament into the endless possibilities of rebirth and renewal within a video game, the chance to play again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
This is an intricate novel, with stories within stories. Much of the focus is on diverse identities. Sam and his college roommate Marx, a third key personality in the story, are both mixed race Asian-American, as is Zevin herself.
But what I do believe is that a novel can show: Here’s a person, like you or unlike you, and can tell you what it is like to be somebody who is not you. I think there’s something great about that.—Gabrielle Zevin interview
We follow Sam, Sadie, and Marx for the next twenty years as they come together to form a successful company (Unfair Games) and as they pull away from each other again and again, and then suffer an act of terror, a by-product of a good intention in one of their games. Although the video game storyline itself is powerful, it is the relationships developed in the story that stay with you. Sam and Sadie have a relationship that never becomes sexual but is grounded in shared passions (as well as blistering arguments). It is about love, partnership, collaboration, and finally finding hope and growth after tragedy.
Easily one of the best books I have read this year, I recommend Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to anyone, whether you be a gamer of today, stopped at Pong, or have never played.