Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about two people who make video games together for thirty years, and if that sentence made you instinctively reach for the back button, I understand, but you would be making a mistake. The book is not about the games industry in the way that industry memoirs are about the games industry (self-congratulatory, jargon-heavy, convinced that shipping a product is inherently heroic). It uses game design the way the best science fiction uses spaceships: as a vehicle for getting somewhere more interesting. In this case, the destination is a sustained, unsentimental, and surprisingly devastating examination of what it means to build something with another person.

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital. Sam is recovering from a car accident that killed his mother and crushed his foot. Sadie is visiting her sister, who is being treated for leukemia. They bond over a Nintendo. They lose touch. They reconnect years later (Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT, a few stops apart on the Red Line, a geography I know well, having lived between those stops for years) and begin making games together. Their first collaboration, Ichigo, a side-scroller set in a world drawn from Hokusai's wave prints, becomes a massive hit. Their creative partnership spans decades. It survives success, failure, jealousy, grief, a shooting, and the persistent, never-quite-resolved question of whether they are in love with each other or merely in love with the thing they make together.

Zevin is ruthlessly precise about the mechanics of creative collaboration. She understands that making something with another person is its own form of intimacy, distinct from friendship and from romance and reducible to neither. Sam and Sadie need each other. They resent each other for the needing. They compete, they withhold credit, they hurt each other in the specific ways that only people who share a creative nervous system can. Marx, Sam's college roommate who becomes their business partner and eventually Sadie's romantic partner, is the third point of the triangle: the person who makes the collaboration possible by handling everything the two principals are too consumed by their own vision to notice. He is the most generous character in the book, and Zevin does something to him that I will not spoil except to say that it earns the novel its Macbeth epigraph.

The title, of course, comes from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day." The speech is about meaninglessness: life as sound and fury signifying nothing. Zevin inverts it. In her telling, the repetition of "tomorrow" is the structure of creative work. You show up. You make the thing. You show up again. The games Sam and Sadie build are their answer to Macbeth's despair, worlds that signify something precisely because someone chose to build them, even knowing they are temporary, even knowing they are fictions. It is the most quietly optimistic book about mortality I have read in years, and it achieves this optimism honestly, through accumulated loss rather than despite it.

What will stay with you, if you work in any field that involves building things with other people (and if you are reading this blog, you almost certainly do), is Zevin's treatment of the authorship question. Who made this? Whose vision is it? Sam's name goes on the company. Sadie writes the engine. The public credits Sam. The code is Sadie's. Zevin shows, with forensic patience, how structural inequalities (gender, disability, class, the specific charisma of who happens to be standing at the microphone when the press arrives) determine who gets remembered and who gets erased. If you have ever pair-programmed on something and watched the other person get the credit, or gotten the credit yourself and felt the quiet wrongness of it, this book will land like a hammer.

Sam's disability (chronic pain from the childhood injury, a permanent limp) is handled with a specificity that literary fiction rarely manages. Zevin treats it as a physical fact that shapes every day of his life, not as a metaphor or a character trait that reveals something about his soul. He is in pain. The pain affects what he can do. Other people's perception of his disability affects how they treat him. That is all. The same restraint applies to Sadie's experience as a woman in the games industry: exploited by a professor, underestimated by colleagues, structurally invisible in ways that accumulate over decades. Zevin documents the mechanisms without editorializing, and the documentation is damning enough.

The novel is 416 pages and reads faster than most 200-page thrillers. It spans from the early 1990s to the 2040s, from the era of the SNES to virtual reality, and it uses the evolution of games technology as a quiet clock ticking beneath the human story. Zevin clearly loves games, but more importantly, she understands why people love them: they are worlds someone chose to build, governed by rules someone chose to impose, offering a kind of agency that the real world, with its car accidents and its cancer wards and its unfair credit allocations, does not reliably provide.

I recommend this book to anyone who has ever made something with someone else and found that the making changed both of you in ways you could not have predicted. It is the best novel about creative partnership I have read, and it is the rare book that treats video games as an art form with the same seriousness that literary fiction typically reserves for itself. If Macbeth is right and life signifies nothing, Zevin's answer is: then build something anyway. Show up tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.