“That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love”: Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’
“You want to play the rest of this life?”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two childhood friends and video game prodigies from LA whose fates are irrevocably entwined one day in a children’s hospital game room, and how they’re reunited years later in 90s Boston where, together with their flatmate Marx, a Shakespearean actor turned business wizard, the Hector to their Achilles and Agamemnon, they decide to start designing their own games, building from scratch a virtual universe that will define an entire generation…
Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.
It’s about charting the labyrinth of time and memory and the maddening crapshoot of divining truth and meaning from the depths of the maze, it’s about debilitating ambition and curiosity and pain and puzzles and grief, the complicity of ignorance, the cruelty of loneliness, the euphoria of making art with people you love, whose faces become so familiar to you it’s like looking at yourself through a magical mirror that allows you to see your whole life in microcosm, caught forever in the omniscient amber of their eyes, and how we find hope in a warm smile, the susurrus of bees, a woman humming Beethoven, a man reciting Macbeth, a thousand paper cranes, people playing in a pond, a perfect peach…
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
This perfect peach of a book was recommended to me first by someone whose taste I consider impeccable, and I’ve since had many discussions with others who have been similarly enthralled about what makes it just so achingly good… It’s a technical triumph, from the mesmerising intricacies of structure, tense, and POV to the pristine lattice of motifs that deftly excavates your soul as you read… But what makes it *perfect* is that its freight is proportioned to the groove.
“I don’t think it’s possible for me to leave you.”
There’s a symbol that first appears on a hidden road sign as a mysterious clue to discovering LA’s legendary network of secret shortcut highways — a triangle of three dots Sam initially mistakes for the mathematical proof mark meaning “therefore”. It reappears hundreds of pages later as a cheat code in one of his video games, where we learn it’s “an upside-down ‘therefore’ symbol” and “when the dots are placed this way, they mean ‘because’”. And then it resurfaces again as the dinkus symbol separating two scenes in the final part of the book.
The answer to the riddle is at the bottom of page 57.
“Why do you keep coming?” she asked.
“Because,” he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children’s psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. “Because,” he repeated.
