Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

22

I am hardly a “gamer,” which should be obvious from my incredibly dated video game reviews. I’m usually several years — if not decades — off trend in terms of where the industry is. But, as luck would have it, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel that starts way back in the 1980s and works its way forward, through an era of gaming that is actually one I recognize. The author, Gabrielle Zevin, being at least somewhat a Gen-X contemporary of mine. Granted, I was more of an Intellivision and Apple IIe Choplifter guy than an Oregon Trail type, but the parallels are there. While this novel is set in the world of gaming and game development, it’s clearly a semi-autobiographical look into nerdom, friendship and how people relate to one another over time. Or maybe it isn’t and all the connections Zevin has to the characters in the book are merely coincidental. But probably not.

First, I will say that this was an absorbing read. It didn’t feel like an almost-500-page book. Zevin’s style is pretty breezy and not overly inside its own head. It’s not quite a beach read per se, but the pace is pretty brisk and the characters and language not overly complicated. Which is saying a lot when her characters all attend either Harvard or MIT. Her main character, Sam Masur, is half-Korean and half-Jewish and goes to Harvard. Not to be overly obvious, Zevin is herself half-Korean and half-Jewish and also went to Harvard. Sam Masur moves to Los Angeles. Zevin moved to Los Angeles. You get the idea. However, Sam is ostensibly an orphan being raised by his grandparents in LA after his mother dies in a car accident and he is left with a debilitating foot injury, which haunts and shapes him throughout the novel. His father never having been in the picture. It’s the 1980s, and while in the hospital for one of many foot surgeries, twelve-year-old Sam meets Sadie Green in the hospital’s pediatric game room. They strike up a friendship, which forms the basis of the novel going forward. They bond over the Nintendo and, of course, Oregon Trail and find a friendship rooted in video game aesthetics and whatnot. Honestly, I’m not really certain what draws them to one another other than they both seem to live pretty isolated, lonely lives. And, frankly, we get some window into the trauma that drives Sam (dead mom, foot craziness and missing dad) but all we’re really told about Sadie is this vague notion that she suffers from depression sometimes and has a sister who is going through cancer treatment (which she survives). It’s a bit of an unequal distribution of character development between two characters whom I assume are supposed to be two halves of a whole.

Anyhow, stuff goes down and the pair stop talking for six years. But then, magically, they run into each other in a subway station in Cambridge when he’s attending Harvard and she’s at MIT. And, look, I didn’t attend either of these fine universities. Zevin did. So, I’m not going to judge the portrayal of either Sam or Sadie or the third member of the main cast, Sam’s roommate, Marx, but they don’t strike me as the serious students that you’d need to be to attend either university. And, also, why is the Asian kid named Marx? What is that all about? But not only does Sadie seem to spend all of her time on her one class coding a game, she also has an affair with her professor and then seemingly misses whole weeks or months of class because of this aforementioned depression that kind of comes out of nowhere when she and the professor break up. Chekhov’s depression, I guess. Anyhow, I don’t know how classes work at this places, but as students they seem to be able to just take semesters off and/or not show up and then somehow graduate? I don’t know, it all seems a little foggy. But when our two protagonists run into each other, Sadie hands Sam her game she’s working on for class — because she just so happens to have a copy with her — he plays it and this sends them on their way to a lifetime of falling out, getting back together, being productive and not productive and an enduring friendship that is a little confusing but also this is a novel, so things don’t need to function like real life.

What comes of all this is a partnership between Sam, Sadie and the aforementioned Marx and a game company called Unfair Games. Throughout the novel we get perspective shifts between Sam and Sadie, which try to balance the two sides of their on-again-off-again friendship and business partnership. But then the Marx perspective is shoved in there and it feels like a bit of a bolt-on solution. As if Zevin kind of ran out of runway with the two main characters and needed to bring in another viewpoint to balance out all the weirdness. At one point — despite being best friends with the guy — Sam calls Marx an NPC. And I honestly tend to agree with him. Sam basically calls him boring. And, again, this isn’t completely wrong. Marx is supposed to be this incredibly handsome, nice guy who originally wants to be an actor, but seems to understand that as an Asian dude he will never play Hamlet. Or something? In fact, the title of the novel comes from a line in Macbeth that he quotes. So instead of just being another hot Hollywood actor who would presumably play second-banana roles, he acquiesces and becomes Sam and Sadie’s video game producer. I don’t know, the whole character does indeed feel like an NPC, just inserted in there to forward the plot and fill in gaps when Sam and Sadie either aren’t on speaking terms or something is going sideways in one of their lives. Until something happens with him — which I won’t spoil — which just feels completely out of left field in this novel about relationships and video games.

I will say that the video games these two do end up producing — which are supposedly either revered or super successful or both — sound kind of lame to me. These are not The Last of Us or anything. In other words, they are not games I’d have any interest in playing. But I suppose Zevin has to envision games that are somehow metaphors for the characters’ stories and not something that is actually commercially viable. It’s a bit like any novel I’ve read about a band that becomes huge. Or movie or TV show where some act or piece of media is a blockbuster. I’m always like would this actually be music that would be consumed by millions of people and make them a viable act? The same concept can be applied here. I’m not certain any of these ideas sound like winners, but in the scheme of things, they’re just viable enough and meld with the narrative enough to be believable. Sort of. Granted, there’s some serious heavy-handedness toward the end of the story where Zevin ensconces us in one of Sam’s games called Pioneer that took me completely out of the novel. The narrative is completely taken over by the plot of this game, which seems both unrealistic in its gameplay and way too obvious in its plot to not be recognized by an MIT grad game developer as a weird long-game ploy for her attention. It’s just super janky and a bit confounding as a plot device and writing choice.

Wow, I’ve had nothing by complaints here. But, honestly, the novel isn’t the best thing I’ve read in terms of a piece of art, but is certainly entertaining. I imagine anyone with a modicum of video game experience will find the references relatively engaging, but perhaps someone with a large video game background or deep vocab might find the details a little shallow. I can appreciate the undulating relationship between Sam and Sadie for what it is — always ebbing and flowing in a somewhat realistic way — but it seems to run out of steam a bit as the book progresses. There are details of Sam’s life, for instance, that are revealed to Sadie decades into their deep-seated relationship that would have 100% been talked about at some juncture prior. It’s almost insulting to us as readers that any of the characters are surprised by any backstory that far into their relationship. There’s also the clunky question of why their relationship has remained plutonic over all these years. I mean, it’s an awkward question, but one that Sam just comes out and asks near the end as if it never came up in the 20 years before, or they never broached up until that point. That seems weird based on the type of closeness they’d had. Not to mention the fact that we’re told at one point early in the novel that Sam isn’t really interested in that type of relationship with anyone — yet we’re later told he somehow had several sexual relationships with both women and men in college at some point. It’s a bit incongruous and inconsistent in terms of his character. Again, I’m only harping on the negative here, but I did enjoy the read. Though, like a video game, I really just wanted to get on to the end so I could move on to play the next one.