Words&Dirt

Summary:

Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a poignant and powerful piece of modern literature. The novel tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two adolescents who strike up an unlikely friendship based on a shared love of video games. As young adults, Sam and Sadie both become video game designers and discover a knack for producing innovative games together. But as their careers take off, their collaborative partnership becomes threatened by their mutual stubbornness and failures to communicate, forcing them to confront their differences and explore the true nature of their undeniable love for one another. Bolstered by Zevin’s excellent prose and a host of delightful supporting characters, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an unforgettable journey that will win over gamers and non-gamers alike.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• There might be other novels that fit this description, but this is the first piece of proper literature I’ve encountered that takes video games seriously as both an art form and a legitimate passion for people of any age. As a person who has struggled to integrate my continued love of video games with the demands of adulthood, I found Zevin’s perspective empowering and validating.
• All of the characters in this novel are wonderful, but I especially loved Sadie. I found her to be an incredibly complex and winning heroine––someone I wanted to root for even when I was critical of her attitudes or behaviors.
• Sam and Sadie’s relationship provides an engrossing examination of the fuzzy boundary between friendship and romance that often arises between men and women who become close. Zevin asks readers to consider the significance of “playing together” as a profound and flexible mode of human connection that can defy traditional labels. These interpersonal dynamics become even more complicated with the introduction of Marx, Sam’s college roommate turned video game producer. Marx is genuinely charismatic, compassionate, and smart––one of the most lovable book characters I have met in a long time.
• Although I definitely think Tomorrow‘s story and characters will appeal to non-gamers, the “gamer” aspect of the novel is not tacked on. The book is replete with references not just to actual video games, but also to the structural features of video games that players are drawn to (e.g. extra lives, the ability to pause the action, saving, scoring points, etc.). Zevin cleverly deploys these features to illuminate the similarities and differences between video games and real life, including a keen focus on how games can become a coping mechanism in the aftermath of tragedy and trauma––for better and for worse.
• Using Sam as her primary avatar, Zevin makes a bold case that gaming worlds represent humanity’s best hope for the construction of true utopias. I’ve considered this idea for a long time, and while I still have mixed feelings about it, I think Zevin adds something really special to the conversation.
• In addition to the gaming-specific themes, Tomorrow has much to say about families, psychosocial development, chronic pain, disability, grief, social justice, creativity, and the question of what makes “great” art. Zevin also weaves in brilliant references to the literary canon, most notably the works of Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, and Homer. At every turn she eschews simplistic thinking in favor of curiosity and nuance.
• Tomorrow is broken up into ten parts, and for the first six the story proceeds with a relatively consistent and predictable structure. But starting with Part VII, Zevin begins to flex her creative muscles in some surprising and daring ways. These sections might not work for some readers, but in my view they pushed the novel from “good” into “great” territory.

Favorite Quotes:

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. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back––I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. (21)

A good game…was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself. (127)

It occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. (142)

She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

She walked through another gate.

What was a gate anyway?

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before. (228)

Despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core…is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be? (252-3)

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time. (301)

What is a game?…It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever. (336)

A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds. (351)

What is love, in the end?…Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life? (355)

For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did. (384)

The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players. (387)

Rating: 10/10