Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day...
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
404 pages - 2022 - fiction, coming-of-age
April 22nd, 2024 — April 25th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This book was spectacularly devastating. A warning that some difficult topics are explored within; please be sure to take care of yourself. It was not a particularly uplifting book, but it was beautiful nonetheless.
I have lived in the greater Boston area for about 9 months now, and it has felt like an eternity. When I am here, I find it difficult to remember the four years I spent in New York or the eighteen years I spent in New Jersey. But when I am back in my hometown, or visiting my school, it feels like I have never been anywhere else. There is a permanence in being anywhere.
This book explores that idea with beautiful nuance. Things within the book change so fast, and yet there is so much that has never changed. Sam, Sadie, and Marx are who they have always been, and they grow so much as the book progresses. I think this was another book that I read at the perfect point in my life.
Graduating college is a terrifying thing. I had no concept of life after school; I could not picture it, myself in the Real World, so I thought that it would not happen. Maybe a small part of me thought that when I walked across the stage, hugged my school’s president, and then grabbed my diploma, a screen would appear telling me that I had beat the game. There would be options: quit or start over. And I would do it all again.
But, of course, this is real life, and that didn’t happen. I graduated and then I was back home, where I had always been. And that felt like it lasted forever. Then I was moving into my first big-girl apartment, and I had been there forever. I was born into that apartment, and it is my first day being alive, and I have been here for centuries.
It’s all very confusing to be alive.
I think one of the strongest parts of this book is how deeply it explores relationships. The main characters, Sam and Sadie—and, to an extent, Marx—have fraught relationships with each other. They are best friends; they are mortal enemies; they hate each other; they love each other; they are one and the same; they are total opposites; they are soulmates; they do not know each other at all. Every interaction they have is completely unpredictable. It’s heartbreaking, but it is fascinating. They are such deep, beautiful characters.
Summary (Spoilers!)
The book starts by introducing Sam and Sadie in a T station in Harvard Square. They went to different high schools but were constantly competing in academic competitions together, so they have gotten to know each other. Sam is at Harvard; Sadie is at MIT. Sam gets her attention and she ends up giving him a copy of a game she has created for a class she’s taking.
We learn that they met in a hospital as a child. Sam had been in a car accident and needed extensive care for his crushed food. Sadie’s sister, Alice, had leukemia. Sadie went to the games room one day and was talking to and playing with Sam. The nurses were shocked, because he had not spoken a word since arriving at the hospital. Sadie starts logging hours of playing with him as volunteer work in preparation for her bat mitzvah. Sam found out because Alice eventually told him, and he was incredibly upset.
Sadie is one of the only women in her games design class, taught by Dov, who created one of Sadie’s favorite games. She makes a game called Solution as an assignment, in which the user does not learn that they are aiding the Nazis in their factory until they start to ask questions or end the game. Dov loves the game and they begin an affair; when they break up, Sadie keeps her cool, but is devastated. During this depressive episode, Sam visits her and says they should make a game.
They make a game called Ichigo, taking off a semester from school, with the help of Sam’s roommate Marx. Sadie goes back to Dov and they live together; she finds herself in increasingly difficult sexual situations with him, including being handcuffed to the bed for hours at a time. When they finish the game, Sam walks Sadie back to Dov’s apartment, and on his way back home, he slips and falls, finding difficulty navigating with his damaged foot in the icy terrain.
Sam has surgery on his foot; Ichigo is released and receives offers from two bigger game companies. They take the more profitable but less creative one, to Sadie’s dismay. They make a sequel that is not as good or fulfilling as their first. Meanwhile, Sam’s foot is in constant pain; Marx learns from his doctor that they recommend amputation, and soon. He convinces Sam and Sadie that they should move to California, where both of them grew up.
We learn that Sam’s mother died in the crash, and they had moved from New York to L.A. because a woman had jumped to her death and landed on the sidewalk in front of the two of them. The woman had the same name as Sam’s mother, Anna Lee. Sam has the amputation. Sadie realizes that Sam was most likely lying to her about not knowing Dov’s relationship to her, and becomes increasingly resentful.
Together, they make a game called Both Sides, where players are in the real world of Mapletown as well as a fictional swampland called Myre Landing. When it is released, players love the real world side, completed by Sam, but despise the Myre Landing side, made by Sadie. Sam has terrible attacks of phantom limb pain; Sadie is upset at the public criticism that she is mostly facing with their new game.
College students Simon and Ant approach their company, Unfair Games, with an idea for Love Doppelgangers, later renamed Counterpart High. It becomes an immediate smash hit.
Sadie and Marx go to Japan together after his most recent breakup. They are constantly confused as being together, and eventually have casual sex, then fly home together. The team decides to transform Mapletown into an online multiplayer game, Mapleworld, headed by Sam. On release day, he realizes that Sadie and Marx are together and goes home in a daze.
Mapleworld becomes huge, and Sam’s character Mayor Mazer becomes an icon. Sadie starts making a game called Master of the Revels that Sam does not endorse. Sadie and Marx move into a house together.
San Francisco legalizes same-sex marriage, and the team heads down so that Simon and Ant can be wed. However, the Supreme Court reverses the ruling; Sam implements marriage into Mapleworld, which leads to a huge flurry of backlash for being political. Sam starts to double down.
Two young men arrive at the Unfair offices one day, planning to shoot and kill Sam. He is not there; he is in New York with Sadie, doing a photoshoot. She learns on this trip that she is pregnant with Marx’s child. There is a section that is a second-person POV tale of Marx meeting the shooters, trying to talk them down, and getting shot in the process. He is in the hospital, surrounded by his family and friends. He passes away.
Sadie can’t go back to the office; Sam continually has explosions of anger. He and Sadie are always fighting when they’re together, which is growing more and more rare. Sam looks through Marx’s desk and finds concept art for a game called Our Infinite Days, created by a married couple. Inspired by this and by a memory of Marx’s performance in Macbeth while in college, Sam creates a multiplayer online game styled like The Oregon Trail, a game Sadie loved as a child.
She plays it, inevitably, as Emily B. Marks, starting up an unsuccessful farm and a mildly-more-successful bookstore-slash-games store. She meets Dr. Daedalus in the game and they eventually get married; her character was pregnant when she arrived and has a son named Ludo Quintus. Eventually, when Daedalus loses her hand, Emily realizes that Dr. Daedalus is actually Sam, as well as a few of the other characters she consistently interacted with. She chooses to leave the game.
Sadie, still friends with Dov, is able to get a teaching position at MIT, teaching the same class he had. She has lunch with Ant, who tells her that Sam’s grandfather had passed away. She attends the memorial, but she and Sam do not interact much as he is in quite a daze.
Later, Sam learns that Dong Hyun left his old Donkey Kong arcade game to Sadie. He calls her and they talk; he wants to make something with her again. She says they make each other miserable. He is finally able to see a Magic Eye picture with her help.
They go to a meeting where another company wants to make Ichigo III, and their concept is intriguing to the two. They talk for a long time over dinner and while walking around. Sam finally tells her that he loves her, and before parting, Sadie gives him a disc with a new game she is making.
Pixels and Code
I have not read many books that span this much time. Every time I thought I understood where the main portion of this book would be, it continued on or jumped forward—it would go from the mention of an idea to the finished product gaining intense popularity. I thought it was refreshing to be so surprised.
The characters are also fascinating—as I mentioned in the intro, the relationship between Sam and Sadie is unpredictable and fraught, but there is constantly the thought underneath that they will be okay. They held a grudge together and did not talk for six years, and then went on to create a game company together. They hated each other through Marx’s death, and then they happily allowed their first success to be ushered into the hands of another.
There is a beautiful sense of foreshadowing throughout the book. Before Ichigo is even released, we learn from interviews that the game was wildly popular, but also led to a growing rift between Sam and Sadie. There is a mention of the “events at Unfair on December 5th, 2004”, but we do not learn what they are until there is the mention of a shooter; a pit in my stomach formed as soon as I realized.
Everything also makes so much sense. Usually that is not something to note about a book, especially a coming-of-age book like this; we expect honesty. But this book felt especially honest in its treatment of characters. They were all so complex. We also have the rare honor of seeing the characters from early in their life—Sam and Sadie were about ten at their earliest in this story—and follow them until they are much older. By the end of the book, they are both about thirty-four; Sadie has a daughter. Most stories or series detail a small sliver of the lives of beloved characters. With them, we get decades, and it is, in my mind, still not enough time.
I found that the story was not predictable. In a similar vein of not expecting the time jumps, I never expected the story beats. Learning that Dong Hyun had passed away nearly knocked the wind out of me. I thought for sure that one of the games they created would be such a failure that it would cause intense strife; the opposite happened, really, but more issues arose from the inner worlds of the games themselves.
It also did not try to do too much. The people were real, but they were flawed. Sam is angry and holds grudges, as well as being incredibly impulsive. Sadie tends to implode inwardly when something upsets her, and she can fall into very deep holes. Marx is often ambitious to a fault and is seen as too charming. Simon and Ant have difficulties taking criticism. Dov is a cringy, power-tripping man, but he still has some genuine advice. None of the characters are perfect—far from it—and none of the characters make the right decisions all the time. I don’t even think I can pick a favorite, because I genuinely did love reading them all.
I read this book for a book club I recently joined, and I am thrilled to hear what they have to say. I’m sure there will be people who did not enjoy it as much as me—that is always inevitable; there are people at both extremes for everything. But I also cannot wait to hear their thoughts on the characters. I think it is the strongest part of a very strong book. And if you’re reading this, and you’ve read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, I’d love to hear your thoughts, too.
Total pages read so far, 2024: 8,940
Total books read so far, 2024: 25
Next book: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson