Summary:
Among the many binaries that can be used to describe people, an
easily observable one is how seriously they take the games they play. There are
those who play basketball or Scrabble to simply relax and enjoy the camaraderie
of their playmates. And then there are others for whom games are invested with
considerably more significance, where winning in rotisserie baseball or a golf
match becomes a statement about their core values, the meaning of life itself.
Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderfully engaging novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
is dedicated to those who proudly include themselves in the latter category.
The novel spans nearly thirty years and centers on three
exquisitely drawn characters who are brilliant and appealing and whose raison
d’etre is to design and promote the best computer games. Sam and Sadie are
intellectual outliers from vastly different backgrounds. Sam’s Korean single
parent mother is an actress wannabe, and he is actually raised by loving
grandparents who own a pizza store in Koreatown in Los Angeles, while Sadie
grows up in a supportive family of high achieving professionals. They meet by chance while Sadie is in junior high
school. As part of her required community service, she visits Sam while he is
hospitalized to treat a horrific leg injury (I am leaving out crucial details
about how that happened). Sadie is drawn to Sam – her more than 900 hours of visits break the
record of service time donated – and he in turn is able to overcome the chronic
pain he endures and to open himself up to someone else.
A genuine bond is forged between the young adolescents that
resurfaces a few years later when they bump into each other unexpectedly in a
Cambridge subway station. Sam is a student at Harvard and Sadie is studying at
MIT. They are both computer geniuses and in the early 1990s there is no better
way to leverage their knowledge than to design innovative and complicated computer
games. They are able to program games that combine literary structure, musical
background, and state-of-the-art color graphics in the service of a narrative
environment that challenges the
intelligence and sustains the interest of the player. Joined by a common friend,
Marx Watanabe, Sam’s roommate at Harvard, who becomes their devoted and
creative producer, they develop a game called Ichigo, a tale of a child lost at
sea who must find his/her (a key part of the game) way home. The game is based
on the famous wood block print, “The Great Wave” by Hokusai and becomes an
international bestseller. They are vaulted into the world of the rich and
famous.
The novel chronicles their professional struggles over the
following decade to maintain the same high level of creativity and mass appeal.
Conflicts arise about assigning credit for their creations and dividing up the
public accolades and recognition. There are the expected strains that are bound
to develop in such a closely knit team of creative collaborators who are
working 24-hour days to meet unrealistic production deadlines. And of course,
there are complicated interpersonal relationships that develop that in such a high-pressure
workplace. There is true joy, but it is always mixed with intense feelings of
envy and nostalgia for simpler times. Other partners and love interests enter
the story. But among this intriguing cast of characters, Sam is singularly complex,
and his leg injury and chronic
disability are crucial elements in the plot; he suffers from severe phantom limb
pain and ultimately he is forced to have his damaged lower leg amputated. How
he copes with his disability, real and imagined, alters the arc of the story to
a significant degree. Sam cannot escape his feelings of being an outsider, even
as he feels himself drawn to Sadie. The imaginary computer game world leaks
into reality. Violence dramatically intervenes in the story and ineradicably
alters the course of events (no spoiler alert). The novel that focuses on the
creation of a virtual reality has a lived-in texture and fullness. I anticipate
that most readers will find the ending to be satisfying, an exquisite
expression of the complexity of human fate and interpersonal relationships.
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