There’s emptiness like the kind of emptiness that’s between Vin Diesel’s ears and then there’s this novel.
(That’s probably not fair on Mr Diesel - there’s gotta be mashed spuds or something in there to make his eyes blink)
This - THIS? - is one of the bestselling novels of the past few years? THIS is all over bookish social media like an electronic STD? WHY!? This novel STINKS. Stinks like Vin Diesel’s movies. (Really, what did we do to deserve The Last Witch Hunter? And why did he have roadkill stuck to his face?!)
I’m fully aware that my literary taste is different from others and so I’ll tend to keep to my lane of novels - most of the time. Because my damnable curiosity occasionally leads me to venture into the questionable realm of the mainstream to see what is captivating the wider reading public. Sometimes it’ll reward me with the likes of Anthony Horowitz, Robert Harris and the first Hunger Games book. Other times I’ll get the cat beaten out of me with books like The Martian, Red Rising and the last Hunger Games book.
And this one.
Here’s the kind of simplistic barely-premise that I would expect a certain bald Hollywood superstar to concoct: Sam and Sadie become childhood friends, bonding over computer games. They grow up and both start making computer games. They are successful. And they are friends. But not for a minute. But now they are. The. Blimmin. End.
Please - collect your socks and put them back on.
It’s nearly (in the edition I read) 500. Pages. Long. And it feels way longer.
The story really is shockingly thin. Gabrielle Zevin plods through the unremarkable lives of two nerdy kids who say and do unremarkable things and generally achieve the things they set out to do with the least amount of effort. We’ll learn all about Sam’s mother’s travails - some rubbish about her name being similar to other women, her struggle making it in the acting world - for an absurd number of tedious pages - to no effect.
Zevin will write so much and say so little nearly all the time. Sam’s mother’s boring life is just such an example of the novel’s larger problems. And I think that’s because this novel really isn’t about anything so Zevin is fumbling around for purchase anywhere but doesn’t find it. We’re told about a gay couple who works for Sam and Sadie’s company but there’s really no point in finding out about their lives because what does it add to the story of, supposedly, Sam and Sadie’s platonic, inane “love”? It doesn’t, but we get a bunch of pages about it for no reason regardless.
An editing rule that applies to good storytelling is to consider whether removing a scene or passage from the story and if the story is unaffected by its removal, then it’s unnecessary and shouldn’t be included. The problem with this rule as applied to Zevin’s novel is that you would end up removing 95% of the novel - that’s how much she waffles on. And on. And on.
God it’s boring.
An oft-cited rule of good writing, at least as it pertains to contemporary literature: show don’t tell. What does that mean? Well, don’t tell me that a character has certain characteristics (eg. Sadie is head-strong). Show me this by writing a scene where we can see that character exhibiting these characteristics, thus subtly communicating to the reader that they possess these qualities. Zevin doesn’t do this. She’s either consciously ignoring that rule, doesn’t know it, or - and I suspect this is the case given how weak a writer she seems to be all round - she’s not competent enough to do this.
This is partly why reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (hereby referred to as TTT) is such an unengaging and passive experience: we’re being told things without seeing them ourselves. It also makes Sam and Sadie the zeroes they are as characters. Zevin just tells us their characters without letting us find out for ourselves or see them do anything to make their characters memorable.
It’s an oddly uneven narrative as well. Zevin writes a lot about Sam’s childhood, his mother, etc. and then provide nothing at all for Sadie - why? Why do we have to know so much about Sam’s parentage and none of Sadie’s? I don’t know but perhaps cut out all that side character garbage and focus on both of the leads instead? That might have made Sadie more understandable as a character rather than have us wondering why she behaves the way she does at any given time. It’s a weird choice given that this is seemingly a novel about those two specific characters.
The other reason for why reading TTT is such a drag is because there’s no real conflict to make the narrative even slightly interesting. Sam and Sadie decide to make games. Gosh, that must be difficult - two penniless kids embarking on a task that few succeed at? Well no. The first game they make is a massive hit. But they need a game engine! Well no. Sadie’s boffing a guy who has one and he’s just going to give it to them. But they’re just two nerds - what about the business side of things? Well no. They happen to know someone who’s really good at business. And has money. Between them, they have the contacts to get them into the industry. And they’re so amazing that they instantly succeed.
Oh. How… fucking boring. Like the 11 or so Fast and Furious movies we’re up to. It’s been over 20 years guys - what can you still be furious about?! Alright back to the review…
But there must be conflict later on down the line, right? Nah. Their next game is a success. Their next game is not so much a success. But their next game is a bigger success. And their next game… zzz…
There’s a pathetic attempt to insinuate Sam has a Machiavellian personality but that, like everything in this awful story, goes nowhere and has no impact on anything. So what’s the point of including this drivel? Exactly. If you’re dropping it because Sam’s actually on the autism spectrum, then follow through with Sadie discovering that about him rather than do nothing further.
To be fair, there is something melodramatic, and yes, completely pointless, that happens near the end to the third banana (they’re not characters, they’re just named objects) but it elicits about all the emotion of the lead actor’s performance in the Pitch Black movies.
As for the games themselves, I found it hard to visualise them. Zevin writes so badly about them that I got a vague idea of their story - Ichigo is some kind of quest and Mapleworld is sorta like online Sims - but not the games themselves. I don’t see anything when I try to imagine Ichigo. Is it a side-scrolling platformer? A point and click? RTS? FPS? RPG? MMORPG? Which goes for most of the other games too, especially Master of the Revels. I find it really hard to believe that a game about Elizabethan playwrights could be a massive success on the level of a AAA game like God of War or Baldur’s Gate 3. And, again, what kind of genre game was this? I’m not suggesting Zevin isn’t a gamer, just that she writes about games with the same level of vision that she writes the rest of this book, ie. without any.
The novel contains so little detail and insight into the video game industry that this could be a book about anything - Sam and Sadie could be artisanal bakers, F1 car designers, synchronised swimmers - just so long as they’re two people in the same field and successful at it, and the story would be completely unchanged.
Hang on my dude, you say. This thing is a runaway success - commercially at least - so how do you explain those apples?
With cynicism, I say. (Hey, that approach is right more often than you’d think!) Look at that cover - who doesn’t love Hokusai’s Great Wave, eh? And then look at this novel’s presence on places like YouTube and TikTok where good-looking thumbnails go some way to translating into ad revenue. If you wanted people in the market for bookish content to click on your video, you’d put books that had great covers front and centre, deploying the same principle any good cover does in selling a book to a buyer.
So its success comes down to it being a pretty object in book videos? I think so. I can’t imagine anyone actually reading this and coming away from it thinking this was amazing in any way. If there was some way of honestly determining how many people bought this book and read it straight through, I’d love to see the numbers - I bet far more people bought it based on influencers pushing it or the cover or both, and never made it even halfway. And I wouldn’t blame them. They’re not stupid for not bothering with this one - quite the opposite in fact!
I hated this book. I give myself all the pats on the back for finishing it. Read a few pages a day and it’ll take a while but you’ll make it through anything. That’s how I get through all the garbage books I’ve read in my life, and how I’ll no doubt get through the crappy novels of the future. But I also abandon more than a few books I’m not enjoying and I only force myself through the seemingly culturally-relevant ones like TTT out of morbid curiosity to find out exactly what makes them so popular. Will this be culturally relevant in a few years though? Maybe - probably not. Either way, I wouldn’t recommend anyone starting this one and, if you have and aren’t enjoying it, know that it doesn’t get better and there’s nothing wrong with dropping bad books, unfinished, in favour of the next, potentially more fun novel you could be reading instead.
The third banana acted in a university production of MacBeth and Sadie made a game based on Elizabethan playwrights, so that’s where the novel gets its title, referencing the famous monologue in MacBeth that begins “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”. Ironically, it’s the last, more famous line of that speech that sums up the novel succinctly: “It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying Vin Diesel.”
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