Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf, 2022)
★★★☆☆
More-literary-than-speculative novel about a trio of friends who make video games.
On the plus side: I felt that Sam and Sadie were well-realized characters, and I appreciated seeing a relationship that was grounded in creative collaboration over sex or romance; I felt like this was the beating heart of the novel and done mostly well.
On the minus side:
I often felt like instead of reading the characters’ own dialogue or thoughts, I was reading Zevin’s, in an immersion-breaking way. Like here:
They had just finished recording the score, and Marx had gone back to Zoe’s dorm room in Adams House. They ate in the dining hall, and then they had sex. Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate. There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.
Why is Marx the kind of person who would suddenly talk about Weltschmerz or the nostalgia of visiting old schools? All we know about him at this point is vaguely that he’s a rich theater kid. Because I haven’t been shown an academic/intellectual Marx (aside from what his name suggests), I disbelieve this is Marx’s thought, and read it as Zevin’s stylistic impulse.
Another example: Sadie and her mother are discussing a proposal for her to befriend Sam as a form of community service. They exchange some dialogue, and then there’s this insertion:
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. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, “There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.
The speaking voice is not Sadie, and it’s not her mom. It’s an unnamed narrator speaking from some future point in time, with knowledge of Sam and Sadie’s adult lives. If it were just that, I wouldn’t mind so much, but this narrator also has strong—authorial—opinions about play and its role in our lives.
These insertions jolt me out of what is otherwise a compelling reading experience. I know that my reaction may not be a universal one, and that “the author didn’t occlude themselves well enough” is a spurious reason to come down on a book. But here it’s symptomatic of a larger issue I have with this novel.
Namely, Tomorrow is trying to say something lofty about why games are important: because they allow people to experience a space of eternal return / live infinite lives, and that connects to why people make games and who they make games for, and that connects to why play offers hope in despairing times.
It’s not an unworthy message, and it ties well to the character story, but it makes games—it makes gaming—a monolith. It tries to say “This! This is why games are art!” And so if, like me, 1) you already believe that games are art and don’t need to be convinced, or 2) you enjoy games for different reasons than stated, it leaves you kind of cold. You can receive all the ways the book attempts to marry literature and play (e.g. by having game-like sequences) and still feel profoundly unmoved.
Trying to name the singular reason why any art form matters already seems like a futile exercise, or at least a conceited one. But it’s especially jarring here because if we’re talking about what makes good games, I might say inclusivity is paramount; that is, games are better—Gaming as an art form and an industry are made better—when anyone can pick up a game and see themselves in the character and participate in the story.
I don’t think any of this is intended to minimize what Zevin’s created. Obviously, it’s gotten me thinking and responding (hello, first book review since 2022!). I don’t know what a successful video game novel looks like for me, but I think that I would want a novel about What Games Are to leave space for What Games Can Be. More likely, if I were to describe a character playing a game, and the profound conclusions this character might draw from the experience, that is where I would leave it. Perhaps the reader would see themselves in the character, or perhaps they would not, but that would be that. It wouldn’t be a treatise, but it wouldn’t try to be, and I think that’s where Tomorrow missed me: trying, and flying wide.
In the acknowledgments, Zevin cites Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell (which I haven’t read, but based on the reviews I’ll likely skip); I wonder how much of her approach is influenced by that text. For the time being, I find Sam Kabo Ashwell’s “A Bestiary of Player Agency” to be a more plural (and therefore more compelling) treatise on why games might matter.