Start Over?
Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
“What is a game?" Marx said. "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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
My Rating: Four out of five stars
This is my second reading of this book. The first “read” was the audiobook version and although I enjoyed it the first time, I found myself distracted and not fully immersed. I recently picked up a hardback from my used book retailer and thought I’d give it another go. Books and games have many features in common, including the freedom to start over.
The novel follows Sam and Sadie, childhood friends turned game-designing geniuses, as they build virtual worlds—and, more dangerously, try to navigate the real one. It's essentially a love story, but without the romance. Instead, Zevin gives us the quirky, complicated dynamics of creative partners who sometimes seem more in love with games than with each other.
I didn’t like Sam very much, I have to say. You feel sympathy for him because he has a bum foot and doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of society. But he’s passive aggressive and an emotional coward. Sadie has her flaws as well, but I found myself rooting for her more because she’s a female in a male’s world and I wanted her to get the credit she deserves.
Sam’s brooding genius pairs perfectly with Sadie’s fiercely independent creativity, forming the sort of friendship that makes you want to punch the other person while also making them your Player 2 for life. Their relationship is filled with the ups and downs of a really good game, and much like any challenging level, there are plenty of restarts, rage quits, and, of course, extra lives.
Zevin’s writing is clever, sharp, and full of heart. She blends the nerdy world of game design with bigger, existential questions, like what it means to create something meaningful, or how we cope with loss and disappointment in a world where you don’t get infinite retries.
This story will likely appeal to anyone who’s ever spent a childhood in front of a screen, developing an unhealthy attachment to pixelated characters and losing track of time in fictional universes. Zevin taps into the magic of those hours spent in imaginary worlds and how, as adults, we sometimes wish we could go back to that simpler, more hopeful time, dial-up internet and all. I was never really a big gamer, but I still connected with the tech nostalgia of the late nineties and early aughts. I want to play Mapletown so bad! It was also an interesting peek into the backstage world of video game production, which is just educational.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a brilliant, funny, and at times achingly bittersweet ode to creativity, friendship, and the beauty of starting over—both in life and in games. Whether you’re a hardcore gamer or someone who’s never touched a console in your life, you’ll find yourself enchanted by Zevin’s virtual and emotional landscapes.
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