A review of “Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin
I was attracted to this novel by its intriguing title, its wonderful cover, and the awareness that it has become a global bestseller. The title is a reference both to the possibility of infinite rebirth offered by video games and to the soliloquy about the meaninglessness of life in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. Spanning two and a half decades, the narrative is about the working and personal relationships between three young pioneers of the American video gaming industry and alludes to many real and imagined games.Now I have never played a video game in my life, the story begins slowly and the text runs to almost 500 pages, so at first I was not sure how I was going to get along with it, but I found that I really enjoyed the novel and did not want it to end. The author knows her gaming, having two parents who worked in computers and being a lifelong gamer, but the novel is as much about love and friendship as it is about the gaming industry and there are some astute observations about ethnicity and disability, so it has wide appeal.
One of the leading characters, comparing his troubled life with that of the gaming character Ichigo that he created, laments: “He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless,immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.” When he gives a TED Talk, he insists: “What I believe to my very core is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference.”
“Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow” is going to be a film and I look forward to seeing it.