Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Author: Gabrielle Zevin

Publisher: Knopf

Genre: Contemporary, Romance

First Publication: 2022

Language: English

Book Summary: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Have you ever looked at a video game—I mean really looked at it, beyond the level of just mindless entertainment—and been struck by the sheer ambition and artistry required to construct those intricately rendered worlds? The countless lines of code, the layered storytelling, the seamless melding of music and graphics into a singularly immersive experience?

Well, if you haven’t quite grasped the ingenuity of great game design before, Gabrielle Zevin’s absolutely spellbinding novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow will make you appreciate the medium’s capacity for magic with every fiber of your being. Because within these pages, she doesn’t just chronicle the intense, beautifully messy journey of two savants and the iconic game franchise they co-create over decades—she makes you feel the intoxicating rush of creative passion that fuels their odyssey.

From those early chapters introducing our protagonist duo Sam and Sadie as young misfits in 1980s Boston, feverishly collaborating on elaborate self-made treasure hunts and exploring video games’ potential for world-building, you know you’re in for a transcendent character study. The way Zevin sculpts the incandescent sparks of their bond—two eccentric, emotionally scarred kids finding their creative soulmate in each other’s singular perspectives—is nothing short of magic.

Every exchange, every gleefully pedantic digression into computer science theory or Bostonian factoids, accrues layer upon layer of insight into what’ll become one of modern literature’s most fully inhabited intergenerational friendships. You’re left basking in the transportive reverie of two minds colliding at maximum sim, thrillingly in sync yet entirely distinct in their pathologies and neuroses.

In other words, the kind of rapport we mortals can barely conceive of, let alone forge for ourselves amidst the quotidian chaos and mediocrity. That Sam and Sadie banter feels so real, so incandescent yet prickly, is a testament to Zevin’s incredible gifts at rendering the sacred alchemy of true collaborative synergy.

And while it would be all too easy to fixate on breathlessly chronicling their technical craft, Zevin wisely chooses to make the storytelling’s true lifeblood her protagonists’ myriad struggles with being stubbornly, gloriously human outside the game design sphere.

She renders all of their fumbling, often graceless faltering with the same delicacy and emotional acuity as their creative zeniths—the failed romances and betrayals, the insecurities that curdle into self-destructive excess, the ongoing mental health battles and trauma echoes that linger long after childhood.

The result is a remarkably compassionate and unvarnished portrait of how the flames of genius often coexist with the addictive demons of obsession and compulsion. How the quest for artistic purity and truth can become so feverishly entangled with one’s personal identity that any deviation from the path feels like a grievous existential breach.

You see it vividly in Sam’s emotional swings—his susceptibility to grandiose spirals of egotism and self-sabotage that threaten to alienate even his closest collaborators. But you also feel it in Sadie’s quieter internal clashes, as she oscillates between pride in her trailblazing status as a female game designer and insecurity over whether she’s just propping up the Sam show.

It’s all conveyed with such tenderness and authenticity that even their most monstrous personal lapses and obsessive fixations feel less like melodramatic plot ploys and more like empathetic windows into the chaos of trying to corral one’s creative lightning into something cohesive—to pursue that sacred spark of inspiration with singleminded ferocity while also, y’know, trying to be a well-adjusted human being.

To say Zevin strikes that balance between the pursuits of passion and personhood with sublime grace would be an understatement. Every digression into creative triumphs and video game lore feels like a tantalizing window into the medium’s divine ingenuity and limitless world-building capacity.

But she never allows those sweet detours into ludological rapture to eclipse the deeply rendered humanity at this book’s core—the lifelong bonds, the push-pull of ambition and compromise, the grit it takes to simply persevere in crafting something enduring out of life’s endlessly disordering variables.

And that, perhaps, is what makes Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’s resonance feel so startlingly universal and cathartic amidst all the intricate dissections of gaming history. Because while few of us can lay claim to the boundless imaginative prowess of a Sadie or Sam, we’ve all endured the morass of creative blocks and identity crises that trail in the wake of any bold endeavor.

We’ve all had to confront how stubbornly messy reality can be when pursuing the abstract platonic ideals of our obsessions. And we’ve likely all fantasized about accessing that elusive purity of flow state where passion project and personal truth become seamlessly intertwined.

Even if you’ve never given two flying hexadecimal codes about coding or gaming narratives, Zevin’s breathtakingly immersive prose and acutely rendered character work ensures you’ll walk away from these pages with a profound new appreciation for the sacred struggle of any creative act—and the quiet miracles required to shepherd one’s grandest visions into reality.

It’s a stunningly resonant reminder that while the final artistic products may dazzle us with their seamless sophistication, the human journeys required to will them into existence will always be fraught with chaos, compromise, and endless revisionism in the face of life’s churning entropy.

Perfection, in other words, is a goal that will forever elude our grasp. But that hopeless pursuit of its shimmering ideals, Zevin argues, is what breathes transcendent meaning into all the mess. What imbues our stumbles and redemptions with the stuff of hard-won myth.

So while few outside of Cambridge’s gaming illuminati may grasp the full significance of Zevin’s casual references to QWOP or her protagonists’ ritualistic reverence for the lock and key of Ludenendorf, those seeming inside baseball flexes are far from exclusionary.

Instead they operate as lovingly rendered tributes to the sacred madness of creation itself—talismans in a richly immersive coming-of-age saga about the all-too-relatable struggle to reconcile grand ambitions with the entropic realities of adulthood.

And really, what more could any of us ask from a novel than to walk away both dazzled by the contours of a world we’d never conceived and awakened to the quiet heroism of our own lives’ wild improvisations? To emerge with a renewed sense of awe for those rare souls capable of channeling life’s endless static into indelible art?

If games, like literature, represent enlightenment at their highest form, Zevin has produced a true modern masterpiece with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. One that honors the pursuit of vision through a singularly empathetic and soul-stirring character lens.

So prepare to be utterly enchanted, alienated, devastated, redeemed, and left basking in profound new perspectives by the end of this instant classic. Just as its creators’ magnum opus will leave an indelible mark on the medium of gaming, so too will Zevin’s spellbinding cross-generational odyssey permanently alter your perceptions of the agonies and sacred ecstasies at the heart of any unforgettable creation myth.