Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow: Too Much Game, not Enough Life

 

 

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW (2022)

By Gabrielle Zevin

Alfred A Knopf, 398 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

I enjoyed The Life of A. J. Fikry, but was less enthralled by Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the latest novel from Gabrielle Zevin. I found Zevin’s characters quite memorable, but a lot of the book deals with America’s favorite anesthetic pursuit: video games. That’s not a habit I ever acquired.  Ironically, I’d rather chill with a great novel rather than read one about video games. Credit to Zevin, though. She’s a gamer, but deftly avoids romanticism; her four central characters are damaged goods.

 

Sam Masur/Mazer is socially awkward and you can take your pick if that’s because he’s on the spectrum, was traumatized his mother’s death in an accident in which he suffered permanent injuries, has suffered discrimination for being half Asian, or some combination of the three. Sam has mobility issues, so it’s hardly surprising that he became an early adoptee of video games.

 

Sam’s best friend from age 12 on is Sadie Green, who grew up with a hazy sense of noblesse oblige. You can imagine the strain when Sam learns he was Sadie’s bat mitzvah “project.” Power dynamics shift in unpredictable and volatile ways. Sam and Sadie love each other, but they frequently don’t like each other.

 

Though estranged, both are brilliant. Sadie goes to M.I.T. and he to Harvard, where he displaces Sadie with a new best friend, Marx Wetanabe. He is easy-going, filthy rich, and becomes the middleman in a video game venture that will also involve Sadie.  Her educational career was more fraught than that of Sam and Marx. She becomes interested in gaming via an egotistical and verbally abusive professor, Dov. Yet they become lovers, despite his complicated domestic ties.

 

Think of Sam, Marx, and Sadie as pulses in electronic and emotional nodes. With Marx as an underwriter Sam and Sadie are legendary and raking in royalties before they are 25. If only egos could be programmed and pain and tragedy could be replayed. In this sense, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an ironic title. Much depends on things that can and cannot be undone.

 

For me, the interplay between the characters is the most interesting part of the novel. Personal and professional crises unfold around the various games that Sam and Sadie develop. The games work well, but issues such as jealousy, intellectual property rights, domestic arrangements, and business decisions are harder to resolve. Soon, a lot of what passes for “communication” is encoded in games, forums, and dummy accounts. That’s not ideal. That little thing called “real life” has a way of not really caring about games, rivalry, or cleverness.  

 

Zevin cleverly parallels moods and situations with games in development whose titles–Ichigo, Both Sides, Counterpoint High, Maple World, The Scottish Expansion, Our Infinite Days, Pioneers–sound like they’re all over the map. That’s because they reveal the changing mindsets and tribulations of their creators. Marx commented, “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.”

 

Of course, life isn’t really a game and Marx’s assertion is only partially true. Win or lose is a binary without nuance. If you hit 30 and you’re no longer a few kids mucking around on computers, own a company, have employees, suffer a cash flow problem, and a big conglomerate wants to buy you, do you keep the faith? Take the money? Surrender creative control? Give up being an underground hero? Count the victims before you get your act together?

 

One could call the novel a 400-page debate over a single question: Which is better, the real or the unreal? An offshoot is whether we ever reach an age in which we stop asking that kind of question. As much as I admired Zevin’s character depth and her juxtaposition of outward success and inner turmoil, I grew tired of the video game hook. I get that Zevin wanted to fuse the unreal/real split to drive home how the barriers between them are leaky. Still, it felt depersonalizing to give equal depth to humans and game content. I also don’t believe humans can resolve their neuroses virtually. I’m certain, though, that Zevin overplayed the humans as joysticks angle.

 

Rob Weir