Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ... there will be love, and games

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin got such superlative reviews that I had to check it out, despite my total lack of interest in the world of video games. I have seen the narcotic effects of unlimited screen time, and I have concerns about the health effects (mental and physical) of gaming as a pastime, especially on young minds. Despite that bias, the book hooked me. It opens in the mid-nineties in Cambridge with students at Harvard and MIT and spans the next couple of decades, during which our three heroes write an amazing game, establish a start-up, move the company to Venice Beach, and grow it into a major player. I felt utterly at home in these settings: I attended MIT just a few years before the novel was set there, and I lived in Venice during the rapid rise of “Silicon Beach” start-ups like theirs. Although Zevin could have made more of unique MIT settings, Cambridge, Harvard yard, and Venice (and a funky treehouse restaurant in Silverlake) all felt well-trod by the author and her characters. 

I agree with reviewers who point out that at its heart, the book is about relationships. Zevin is wonderful at building characters and relationships out of scene and dialogue, instead of over-relying on explanations as interiority. She is also masterful at writing characters with just the right mix of neurosis, pathos, and mystery to feel fully human. Even her secondary characters leap off the page and live in the imagination. The novel is as immersive as a good video game, and I read it in a few sittings over a few days.

Although it is most fundamentally about the love between the three main characters and the challenge of becoming truly an adult, the novel is also deeply about the world of gaming. If you have a dug-in aversion to gaming, as opposed to just a never-been-my-thing attitude, you will probably not want to spend a whole novel with these people. They spend hours in front of their screens, playing without pause. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of games past and present, and their conversations are peppered with references to them. They seem to enjoy virtual fantasy worlds much more than this actual one, and their love of those worlds made even me wonder what I was missing. There is tremendous authority and warmth in the depictions of the gaming community, and it is not surprising that Zevin herself is a lifelong gamer. 

To bring alive the process of building games, as opposed to playing them, Zevin seems to have relied, in part, on her knowledge of creative writing, and many of her descriptions of developing a game read like descriptions of developing a novel. For instance, the MIT gaming seminar that figures both early and late in the novel sounds just like a fiction workshop: two submissions per week, a notoriously difficult instructor, a round of (sometimes scathing) student critique, and all that is problematic about the almost-assured decimation of fragile new work. I admit that I thought such a class lacked the technical rigor to be offered at the institution as I knew it. What I appreciated about those descriptions, though, was how sympathetic and familiar the process became through Zevin’s eyes. These game builders are not the antisocial basement dwellers we might associate with the coding community. They are artists: imaginative, articulate, and, above all, passionate about building a world that they love and that will be loved by others. They write games to make the world a better place, not unlike the aspiration of many writers. Their past gaming experience – all that reverence for Donkey Kong and The Oregon Trail, all the way back to text-based (!) games – read to me as the analog to immersion in the literary canon; like a strong literary background, their anchoring in past games rendered their innovations richer and more satisfying. These are true creatives, people I could relate to and wanted to be friends with.

Of course, authors are under no obligation to write characters that we like. Like politicians, it should be irrelevant to their success whether we want to have a beer with them. What matters to the success of a fictional character is that we believe them – not that we agree with their choices, but that we believe that that person would make those particular choices. And in this, Zevin completely succeeds. Her great gift in this novel is to stand up complex and dynamic characters with a prose style that felt effortless. She did for me what her characters want to do with their games: created a fully realized world and populated it with characters I will not easily forget.