Play

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW

By Gabrielle Zevin.

397 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.

Before the infinite scroll and the newsfeed, before echo chambers and The Algorithm™, there were video games. For all their villainization by conservatives and parents and conservative parents, they compel our empathy and imagination: their worlds, their deaths, their victories are also ours. So what inspires and begets video games—and what can we learn about our real lives from our virtual ones?

These are the questions at the heart of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (“T&T&T”), Gabrielle Zevin’s latest novel and runaway darling of sales agents and book critics alike. Sam Masur and Sadie Green, its main characters and childhood friends turned enemies turned co-founders turned enemies turned you get the idea, drive the book’s oddly inert plot from Los Angeles to Harvard/MIT (always Harvard/MIT) to cyberspace and beyond. They are irritating, dear, charming, unbearable—they are good, maybe even great characters. They unfortunately do not make up for the uneven reading experience that is T&T&T, with its inability to enliven video games, its self-indulgent writing, its essential rudderlessness despite its guiding questions. In dissecting it, your correspondent hopes to help future writers avoid bugs in prod, as it were.

The writing, from the first chapter, wears the reader’s patience with its heavy-handed foreshadowing and its clumsy narration—third-person personal, but also omniscient and strangely backward-looking. The first sentence ought to have given your correspondent pause: “Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds …” Yes, it keeps going. Such a grand first sentence announces much but says little, especially when the present tense it gestures at with its “before”-s doesn’t manifest properly for two-thirds of the novel. The remainder of the first chapter is devoted to the first meeting in some years between Masur and Green, in a Boston subway station. Masur’s anxiety at seeing his friend-turned-enemy seems as stilted and explanatory as a documentary voiceover: “he felt overwhelmed by how much time had passed since he and Sadie had last been alone together,” “time, Sam thought, was a mystery,” “he had not stood this near to Sadie in years.” The scene reads as if written by Sam himself, more comfortable around joysticks and game controllers than the English language or girls. The style would be an impressive or at least interesting feat, except it doesn’t improve for the remainder of the book.

For the next hundred or so pages, as Masur and Green become friends again and then collaborators on a video game, snippets from their future?—past?—future perfect?—interviews crop up, with precise markings of the year as well as publication sources. It’s an interesting device, possibly referencing the use of pseudo-publications in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, which had full Chicago-style citations of nonexistent papers which effectively blurred the line between the novel’s fiction and its historical backdrop. But the condensed appearance of a handful of articles or interview transcripts early on followed by a complete absence bespeaks a whim more than a fleshed-out narrative device. The paucity of definite temporal markers in the plot itself (the aforementioned reunion of Masur and Green take place “in the waning twentieth century” (in itself a wretched phrase, overwrought and serving no material function)) only exacerbates the disjointedness of the book’s plot, narration, and structure.

The duo, joined by Marx Watanabe, Masur’s roommate, works on their video game Ichigo during their last year in college. The whole sequence, replete with the tropes of each of their three archetypes—Masur the uber-nerd, Green the ambitious student out of her depth, Watanabe the aw-shucks golden-retriever friend—becomes tiresome even in its most uplifting moments. Masur codes “until his fingers bleed” (a respectable attempt at showing-not-telling, except for Zevin’s eyeroll-inducing “he was accustomed to discomforts far greater” immediately after), passes out on his way to buy supplies, and forgets what the sunset looks like. Green, attempting to build the game’s graphics-physics engine, must turn to her professor-turned-lover, an oafish, arrogant, and manipulative “genius,” for his help and code rather than compromise her vision of her character’s movements conjuring “water in motion.” Watanabe—well, he keeps Masur and Green fed and watered, pays the rent on the townhouse where they work (his father is in banking), and otherwise performs in plays and sleeps around (but, lest you get the wrong idea, he’s still friends with all of his hookup partners and exes, yes sirree bob).

And so, when they finish Ichigo, one knows a great deal about how hard everyone worked, but little of what that entailed or meant to them. There is not one extended meditation on the concept art, not one hair-pulling debugging session, not one panicked recovery of accidentally-deleted code. The game sells well; reviews are resoundingly positive; they are practically begged to make a sequel. The book declines to elaborate, as if these accolades for themselves.

And this speaks to the fundamental failure of T&T&T. So little of what it aspires to do—elevate the work of designers and programmers to an art; explicate the super-romantic, super-fraternal bond of creative partnerships that change the world; speak to the power of the virtual realities which sustain us—comes across as convincing. Furniture-makers have Donna Tartt; tennis players have David Foster Wallace; video-game designers decidedly do not have Ms. Zevin. Meanwhile, the stubbornness and emotional constipation of Masur and Green–both unwilling to give an inch in any argument—comes across just as often as petty and small as geniuses duking it out. As for the video games they build—a lost child searching for home, an MMORPG (think World of Warcraft or Club Penguin) where gay marriage is allowed before the real world catches up, a farming-trading game inspired by Stardew Valley: they are imaginative, ahead of their time technically and politically, and yet simply un- or underexploited as objets d’art. Why do all the characters keep saying they love the games without talking about why they love them?

T&T&T has moments of brilliance; it has many of them. Just when your correspondent was about to give up on the novel appeared twenty pages of second-person narration, hovering between reality and hallucination, sensibility and delirium; it was both the most technically accomplished and moving writing of the entire novel. Its supporting characters—proud grandparents, Green’s slimy boyfriend, Masur’s deceased mother—play their parts memorably, as do Masur and Green themselves. And, questionable writing quality aside, it did somehow keep your correspondent reading—he finished it in three days—and that’s not nothing.

On a parting note, regarding its title. The game studio Masur and Green found, Unfair Games, could have been called Tomorrow Games, if Masur and Green had accepted Watanabe’s pitch, based on his favorite Shakespearean soliloquy. In tying her book so closely to a single, specific work, Ms. Zevin risked over-emphasizing it, or setting the reader up for a letdown: “That’s why you titled it like that?” And indeed, Watanabe’s three-line pitch for Tomorrow Games is all we hear of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” It is a non-motif, clever for twenty seconds and otherwise in your face—not unlike many a student in Cambridge. For this reason, and so many others, your correspondent would be perfectly happy never to hear of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow again.

[Written 2024]

---