3 October 2023
By Juha(Lucy) Kim
Summary
Spanning 30 years of friendship, partnership, and love, the brilliant Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin begins and ends with two such brilliant characters, Sadie and Sam. It tells the story of their childhood to adulthood and how their mutual love of video games carries into a future of fame and fortune. This novel examines and braves through harsh realities, the intricate nature of identity, wrenching grief, and disabilities, as well as the redemptive possibilities of life. While it is a love story, it is nothing like you have ever read before.
Review
This novel solidified something vital in me as an aspiring writer myself: that authors are indeed some of the most talented creatures alive on this earth. I knew this already, of course, but it was more the realization that being a great writer means you are educated to the point of ridiculousness. Not only in literature itself, the extensive study of written and verbal artistic expression and its various dimensions, but also in the branches and topics of what they write about.
In this case, video games, designing them, making them, coding them. Without Gabrielle Zevin's extensive knowledge of game design, coding, and every other complicated thing, this novel wouldn't be half as good as it is. Subpar authors lack the precision and competence needed to study, research, or know half the things they should. The consequence is, of course, the open mockery of modern contemporary lit.
Zevin's writing is honest, open, and free, untethered to the stereotypes of modern literature, what it should or shouldn't be, how it should be written, and how it shouldn't. Everything from the storyline to the literary elements, the plot, and the foreshadowing is so incredibly detail-oriented. I must make it clear that this novel is about so much more than just video games. It encapsulates much of the human experience in a bold and different yet nuanced way. Themes of grief, disability, and identity—the humanistic way they are broached and written—are the epitome of what I believe beautiful writing to be. I could go on for years about this book, and the way it made me fall in love with modernist contemporary all over again. And yet, while the writing itself is its own brilliance, the bigger and more substantial eminence of the book is its characters.
The majority of the time, authors write their characters for a certain purpose, for an aesthetic. But other times, much more scarce, is when authors write their characters to be real, tangible, and palpable, humans with their own thoughts and feelings that occasionally cannot be controlled. In this way, they were extremely irritating. I could see the poignant flaws of human nature in them. While Sam and Sadie were both loveable, creative, brilliant, and charming, they were also arrogant, infuriating, conceded, and childish. Feelings of utter annoyance and exasperation often frequented my mind whilst reading. However, none of it mattered. I was okay with their ignorance, arrogance, and selfishness because over it all was a warmth I held for each of them, a clear awareness that I could not be like the rest in the fast judgment I made of them. I felt total and complete intimacy with the characters and with the book itself. It was a surreal, breathtaking feeling I had seldom felt before.
It is a testament to Zevin's talent that I was not bored once while reading a book about a topic that typically bores me to death. Whether it was a virtual world or the real one, through an avatar or through a person, Sam and Sadie's story kept me absorbed and unconscious of the happenings around me. This book is genuinely one of the greatest books I've ever read in my life. If you do one thing today, tomorrow, next week, or next month, I recommend reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.