Book Club Recap: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is not the type of book to which I would normally gravitate. The cover has a technological feel that gives it an almost sci-fi/fantasy vibe. So, I resisted adding this to our TBR. However, the abundance of praise convinced me to give it a shot. One should read outside one's usual scope, right?
Well, I was in for a surprise. This is not a book about tech. It is a book about relationships. And it is GOOD!
As usual, Writers' Book Club had varying thoughts on this book: some loved it, some couldn't get into it and ended up DNFing it, and some persisted but struggled with it. So much of the experience of reading is a matter of taste. But one thing was undisputed: Gabrielle Zevin is a talented storyteller. Here are some of our takeaways:
STRUCTURE
One of the marvels of this book is that it seems to be linearly written—and for the most part it is—but it also moves forward and backward in time.
The book opens when Sadie and Sam meet at the train station while she is in MIT and he is in Harvard. The very next chapter takes us back to when they first met—at an LA hospital when they were twelve. After that, we’re back in present time, and moving forward.
But by then, it is established that the author can dip in and out of backstory—writing it in actual scenes—whenever she pleases. This ‘culminates’ when she actually crafts a scene where we get a POV of Sam’s dead mother, depicting a moment when she decided to leave NY for LA, a moment that led up to the chain of events resulting in Sam’s broken foot, the hospital stay, the ensuing friendship with Sadie, and all that happened going forward: a nod to one of the points of the book, that so much in life and in games is about choosing one course of action that then reverberates infinitely (though, in games, unlike in life, you get a re-do).
Reading, I was never jarred by these transitions. In one moment, I would be reading about Sam and Sadie playing a game, and in the next moment, I might be reading about his mother witnessing a suicide. When things are seamless in books, it’s because the author has done a good job. It also makes it harder for us to notice what they’ve done right, and therefore explore how they did it.
Handling backstory is one of the crucial decisions the writer needs to make. As Lisa Cron puts it, every story begins in the middle. Which means, on average, half of what we write is backstory. We can present that backstory in (roughly) three different ways:
through flashbacks (segments of present-storyline scenes that inform us about backstory through context)
through dual or multiple storylines (alternating between present and past storyline)
through a fragmented narrative (writing occasional scenes in the past storyline, but without a noticeable pattern to it).
The latter is what Gabrielle Zevin did: she used the omniscient narrator to wield the timeline as she sees fit. Sometimes, she fast-forwarded to the future, offering breadcrumbs of what is to come to compel us to read forward (hence, creating narrative drive); and sometimes, she dipped backward, showing us an entire scene from the past.
The key to being able to execute this is to make the transition seamless. The narrative in the present storyline needs to lead naturally to the past. It also needs to pose questions and make us curious, so that when we actually dip into the past storyline, we are not jarred by the transition, but curious and actually glad that we get to have our questions answered.
Two conclusions here: 1) Gabrielle Zevin does this brilliantly; 2) Only do this if you are skilled enough a writer.
WHAT IS THE STORY HERE?
Not everyone in our book club found this book to their taste. Some members said they didn’t like the omniscient narration; that they prefer being closer to the POV characters, closer to their emotions, more inside their head. Some would’ve preferred if this was a story that was more focused on Sam and Sadie’s relationship, and less so on their work and gaming business.
This opened a discussion. Could this story have been told differently? Could this story—as it is—be written in a close-third or first POV, or by drilling deeper into Sam and Sadie’s motivations and choices?
It would have been A STORY for sure, but not THIS story.
This is a matter that thoroughly fascinates me. There is a story, and there is a way in which we contain the story—put it on paper. Our job as writers is, first and foremost, to determine what the story is: What is its scope? What is its reach? What are we trying to say here? — and only then can we choose the tools that are suitable to bring that story to life.
It’s not unlike standing in front of a block of wood and deciding whether you want to make a tabletop or a statue out of it. Only when you know what you actually want to do, can you determine whether you need a saw, or a chisel, or a plane.
In writing, saws and chisels and planes are POVs, and PLOT decisions, and POINT, and so on.
If this novel had been written in a closer POV, and/or with more focus on the minutiae of the relationships in the book, then it would simply be a different story. For example, when Sadie and Marx end up in a relationship, the way they hook up is pretty detailed, but how they actually fall in love is more or less, glossed over.
Could the author have focused on that aspect and develop it more? Sure. But is that the focus of THIS story? Not really. The author put the emphasis on how Sam processed the information instead—because that’s where this story is. The fact that Sadie told Marx about her next game idea instead of Sam; the fact that Sam-and-Sadie comes second to Marx-and-Sadie now; the fact that Marx supports Sadie’s ideas not only from a standpoint of a producer, but also as her lover. How hurt Sam feels, how pissed-off with himself that he hadn’t found the courage to ever tell Sadie how he feels about her. THAT is the story here, not how Sadie fell in love with Marx.
CHARACTER ARC MOVEMENTS
One of the things I found the most fascinating in this novel was how subtly the character arcs move forward. Most of the writing and outlining frameworks out there teach us to use tent-pole scenes that move the character arc in significant ways. In other words, they teach us to use significant plot developments that are capable of making the character do significant leaps, because nobody changes unless they really have to, right?
And while that works (especially for novels that are more commercial in their nature and execution), sometimes massive steps can be made with moves that seem almost underhanded.
Here is how Gabrielle Zevin allows Sadie to overcome feeling as a failure after the games she makes isn’t well received in the market; especially the part of the game that was her creation.
On the third morning of their trip, early, before any of their meetings, Marx took Sadie to the Nezu Shrine. The Nezu Shrine has a tunnel of red torii gates for visitors to pass through. Sadie asked Marx what it meant when you passed under the gates, and Marx said in Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to sacred. But Marx was not Shinto so he did not entirely know. “I used to come here when I was a teenager and I had a problem I needed to solve.”
(…)
Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she had arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t).
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the endo of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides has failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in the long line of spaces between gates.
Like I said, when things land on the page just right, they are un-noticeable. But I love taking a step back, imagining a moment when the author sat down and wrote inside her outline (not saying that this really happened—just imagining it) and writing:
Plot: Sadie walks through torii gates
Point: She feels resolved.
It feels so counter-intuitive, when you read it like this, doesn’t it? What does passing through torii gates have to do with Sadie moving on from her failure? A lesser writer would have imagined a stronger plot event, one that is capable of pushing Sadie out of her nihilism. But the fact that it’s so underhanded is what makes it so brilliant. Because it is a huge leap. But it’s the character who does all the jumping.
WORLD-BUILDING
There is no doubt that, even though the book takes place in both the era (1980-2010) and place (US) most of us find familiar, that there is a lot of world-building that went into this book.
The gaming angle is such that it required not only an extensive understanding and research on the author’s part, but also a deft hand delivering it to the reader.
While some members might not have liked that the book was set in the gaming environment, most of us agreed that the world-building was seamless. Most of us know next-to-nothing about games, but reading about them and understanding the setting was not something we needed to especially pay attention to. The key to this, we find, is that the author, clearly knowledgeable herself, wasn’t condescending. She explained enough for us to understand, but never stopping the narrative to fill us in on what’s what. She assumed our ability to get on board, and through this she avoided the dreaded pitfall of telling.
One more thing that was mentioned during our discussion: world-building in this book is only a lens through which we explore the relationships, not the other way around.
Take The Martian as an example—a superb sci-fi novel by Andy Weir. The setting is everything. Sure, it’s a story about exploring the enduring human spirit, what we are capable of going through—of mastering—in order to survive. But the focus is on Mars and this harsh environment that the protagonist needs to deal with. It is the first thing that comes to mind when you think back to that book.
Here, the focus is the relationship between Sam and Sadie. A multifaceted relationship between friends who turn into (fr)enemies then into colleagues, with a strong emotional chord always tying them together. Gaming is just a lens we see it all through, but it isn’t its focal point.
SPECIFICITY
Which leads me to one of the perhaps most impressive things about this book. Every writer knows the struggle of specificity. From conceptualization (what sort of relationship, why, in what setting, what kind of person, how does that person relate to another person) to execution (avoiding generalized words like something, a thing, sometimes, everything, and stuff); from on-page (where are they standing, what are they doing with their body language, what does the setting look like) to off-page (knowing exactly what had happened off-page so that you can write what happens on-page in an informed manner), it is excruciatingly hard to envision and execute a story world that is specific.
This is where Gabrielle Zevin excels. There is nothing unspecific with her world. We know exactly what sort of art Marx’s mother makes. We know what sort of things coyotes do in LA. We are privy to Sadie envisioning her first game, and the brilliance of its no-win scenario. A lesser writer might have been vague about it, but we get all the details here.
The Hokusai’s wave, the William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, the glass flower garden in Harvard… The visuals, the art, the references, the metaphors, the similes, the descriptions… everything so specific that it keeps you glued to the page, your brain firing and lighting up with new information with every paragraph. For me, this created not only a narrative drive of sorts (what else will I find out? what new things will I learn next?), but also an immersive effect that made me feel like I was—and wanted to be—a part of Zevin’s gaming world.
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With that, I’ll wrap up this month’s book club recap! Hope you enjoyed reading it. Until next time—keep safe and keep writing!
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Have you read this book? Did you like it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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