TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW
By Gabrielle Zevin
Most kids who play a lot of video games don’t grow up to be avid readers. On the other hand, not every child who reads a lot of books grows up to be an avid reader. But in the diverse taxonomy of the modern gaming audience exists the literary gamer – someone for whom reading and playing are and always have been the same journey. It would never occur to the literary gamer that one activity negates another. The literary gamer believes that reading and playing enhance systematic thinking and the mysteries of imaginative empathy. For better or for worse, this reviewer is a recognized literary gamer – and I call on my siblings to join me in a recitation of Fünke’s Axiom: “There are dozens of us! Thousands!”
Gabrielle Zevin is also a literary gamer — in fact, she describes her devotion to the medium as “lifelong” — and in her delightful and captivating new novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” Richard Powers’ “Galatea 2.2” and the stealth action video game “Metal Gear Solid” undisputedly stand side by side in the minds of its characters as fundamental source texts. This is a story about brilliant young game designers who achieve it big and slowly grow apart – and Zevin burns exactly zero calories arguing that game designers are creative artists of the highest order. Instead, she takes that as a given, and wisely, because the best of them clearly are. “There is no artist,” says one of her characters, “more empathetic than the game designer.”
Zevin’s three main characters are Sadie, Sam, and Marx, smart young people who immerse themselves in game making together, while students at Harvard and MIT may be a little too smart about Sadie and Sam. Their first meeting takes place in a hospital when they are both 11, while the chronically ill Sam Super Mario Bros. plays in the recreation room of the children’s ward. When young Sadie asks young Sam if he is dying, like many of the children around them, he replies, “This is the world, everyone is dying.”
Sam and Marx are both mixed-race Asian Americans, and one of the most psychologically interesting materials in the novel has to do with their complicated feelings of not belonging. Sadie, on the other hand, is the trio’s thwarted genius, and when she and Sam reconnect in college, she shows him an edgy video game she designed called “Solution,” a riff on the controversial game designer Brenda Romero’s (and brilliant) board game “Train”. Sam, overwhelmed, decides to dedicate his life to making games with Sadie. They quickly become best friends, but never lovers, despite Sam’s unspoken, albeit obvious, longing for her. But as Sadie explains to Sam towards the end of the novel, they shared a bond much greater than physical affection. Loved ones are “ordinary,” she says, while “true associates are rare in this life.”
Because this is the world – especially the video game world – it’s Sam whose work gets the lion’s share of cultural and critical attention, despite Sadie’s arguably larger contribution. To Zevin’s credit, she portrays this long process of creative usurpation as the fault of no one in particular, even making an effort to show Sadie’s complicity in her own removal. In short, it’s complicated, as most matters of artistic collaboration are. While Sam and Sadie are making their first game, “Ichigo”, they decide not to give an explicit gender to the eponymous character, calling the little creature in the middle of the game just “they”.
Ultimately, a game publisher urges Sam and Sadie to go ahead and call Ichigo “he” — games with female protagonists don’t sell, they’re told — and it’s Sam who urges Sadie to capitulate. Their first creative fissure forms – and we spend the rest of the novel watching it widen along a fault line of fame, money, success and eventual tragedy. Zevin understands a lot of the detailed stuff about game development, including the pivotal role of having a good producer – this is Marx, in the case of Sam and Sadie – along with a lot of the terminology: “volumetric lighting”, the shorthand use of “MC” for main character, “texture layers” and so on.
What’s largely missing here, though, is the unadorned reality of game making. For example, the despair that comes from an idea that seems nice, but isn’t nice, no matter what you do. There is very little view of how central game testing and quality assurance is to game design, or of destroying core designs because of cost overruns or under talent. Sam and Sadie’s games tend to work the way they imagine, but one of the most acclaimed titles I’ve ever worked on, “What Remains of Edith Finch,” a game about a cursed family whose members all perished. in freak accidents, his life started as a diving simulator, of all things. No one – trust me on this – wants a completely accurate game development novel, which would be a thousand pages of motionless boredom with a thrilling 10-page coda, but if there’s any criticism of Zevin’s novel, it’s the professional parts of life. some of her game makers seem way too easy, while the personal parts often seem way too difficult.
I have no idea if Zevin ever read John Irving’s “The World By Garp”, but she seems to have subliminally recreated it in some way. Both novels are about highly creative people who struggle, and often fail, to overcome their sex baggage, their mother baggage, their cash baggage, and identity baggage. Both novels deal in what might be called capriciousness – a smiling, bright-eyed march in pitch-black narrative material: childhood trauma, amputation, a narrative pivotal fatal car accident. Both are eventually torn apart by a random act of shocking violence.
Some readers will appreciate Zevin’s unwavering willingness to show how the cancer of American violence can affect the mildest and most admirable among us, but this event also turns the cultural problem of American violence into an aesthetic problem in the novel. Aesthetic issues can make you pound your knuckles in a book review, but fiction can’t meaningfully address a cultural issue as important as this one without making it absolutely central to the story the writer is trying to tell. It’s not that the violent event depicted by Zevin is not credible. It’s all too believable. The problem is that, as horrifying and shocking as it may be, this violent event just isn’t as interesting as what happens around it (a problem this novel just happens to share with “Garp”).
But not everything in a story as expansive and entertaining as Zevin’s can be for the best, as they say, and we’re pleased that dozens of literary gamers will cherish the world she has lovingly conjured up. Meanwhile, everyone else will wonder why it took them so long to recognize the beauty, drama and pain of human creation in video games.
Tom Bissell is the author of 10 books, including “Creative Types,” which was published last year. He has also written or co-written more than a dozen video games.
TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, by Gabrielle Zevin | 416 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28