Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Review

I came to this book late. It had been on every list and in every conversation for about a year before i actually picked it up and by the time i did i had managed to absorb so much ambient information about it that i was slightly worried there would be nothing left to discover. I was completely wrong about that. You can know the outline of this book perfectly well and still be surprised by what it does to you while you are reading it.

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet when they are children in a hospital in Los Angeles. Sam is recovering from a serious injury to his foot and Sadie is visiting her sister and they spend time playing video games together and it is the kind of connection that children sometimes make in circumstances that would not produce connections in adults. Then they lose each other. Years pass. They find each other again at university in Cambridge Massachusetts in the early nineties and they start making games together and everything that follows across the next thirty years comes from that reconnection.

What Zevin is writing about is collaboration and what it asks of people and what it takes from them. Sam and Sadie are both brilliant at making games and they are most alive when they are working together and the relationship between those two things is what the book is really exploring. The creativity is not a backdrop to the emotional story. It is the emotional story. What they make together is how they love each other and that means that the work can also be where they hurt each other most badly and Zevin is honest about how that works without ever being cruel about it.

I want to say something about Sadie because i think she is the more interesting of the two main characters and i have seen her discussed less than Sam in most of the coverage i have read. Sadie is trying to be taken seriously in a field that does not take women seriously without making her whole identity about that struggle and Zevin handles this with a lot of care. Sadie is competitive and sometimes difficult and occasionally wrong about things and also enormously talented and the book never reduces her to a symbol of anything. She is just a person trying to do the thing she is best at in a world that keeps putting conditions on whether she is allowed to do it. I found her more relatable than Sam which surprised me and i think says something about how specifically Zevin drew her.

Sam has a disability that affects his foot and the way Zevin writes about this is one of the things i admired most about the book. It is always present. It shapes how he moves through the world and how he thinks about his body and what he is capable of. It is not inspirational and it is not a metaphor. It is just a fact about his life that has consequences and costs and Zevin treats it with the same specificity she brings to everything else.

Marx is the third major character and he is in some ways the warmest thing in the book. He is Sam's college roommate and he becomes important to both of them in different ways and his presence in the story gives you a version of uncomplicated affection that the Sam and Sadie relationship is too complicated to provide. Something happens to Marx in the second half of the book that i knew was coming because someone had accidentally told me and i was still not prepared for it. I actually put the book down for a few minutes after a certain chapter. That is the measure of how well Zevin had made me care about someone who is not even the central character.