Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
There are two kinds of books that I read almost every day: books for school and books for my own writing process. The books I read for writing can be any kind of story, as long as they’re novels. It helps—in trying to write a novel—to be consistently reading novels that make me feel excited, that remind me that writing a book and having it exist in the world can be done and not only that but (miraculously?) done well.
While talking about books I read for school comes somewhat easily to me, talking about books I read for my own writing process feels harder. I guess part of it is that these writing process novels are often read as soon as I wake up in the morning—in the groggy early morning hours that I carve out to make room for creative work before the work work of being in grad school. Like the journaling and writing I also do in the morning, my reading at the start of the day feels like a distant memory by mid-afternoon, and especially when I try to think back and remember a novel in detail.
I think it’s also hard to talk about books I read for my writing process because I’m approaching them differently than I would if I was just reading them for fun. I’m trying to figure out how these writers did what they did more than I’m trying to figure out if I like the story they’re telling. I am a sucker for beautiful language, but beyond that, I can forgive a lot of other missteps that I might have less patience for if I wasn’t reading as a writer. I understand that books can take years to write, decades even. I understand that, once you’ve sold it, you don’t always have the final say in how your book enters the world, that there are a lot of other hands in that pie. I also understand that it is so much easier to criticize a thing than it is to make a thing so, even just in my own head as I read in the wee hours of the morning, I try to give novels grace when I can.
I’m slow to talk badly about a novel, but I don’t always finish them because I want to read books—always—that I can learn a lot from. When reading a book that I find helpful in that way, I wonder about that writer’s process. When did this moment in the book happen—in the first draft, the fourth? How did they get the language to be this buffed up and shiny, and what about the energy of it—how did they make it buzz like this or move so steadily between lines, pages, sections? I want to know everything about a good book, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a very good book.
A lot of people feel this way. This novel is immensely popular, and as I’ve discussed before, I usually keep my distance from popular things for as long as I can. I keep my distance until I remember that not liking what everybody else likes just because everybody else likes it might make me more insufferable than it makes me interesting. Maybe being interesting is ultimately just liking what you like regardless of the hype around it. I don’t know. Anyway, I got Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as a birthday present from one of my friends, and because I now owned it, I figured I might as well give it a chance.
What I respect about this novel more than anything is the sturdiness of the story. It spans time-wise and character-wise without losing itself in the process, without becoming uncentered. The writing is self-assured, and the storyline is so well researched and believable that I continually had to remind myself that this was, in fact, something that Gabrielle Zevin had made up in her head.
While I tend to veer in my taste more toward minimalist, funny, kind of absurd stories, I found the somewhat maximalist nature of this one really refreshing. It’s about two video game developers (and all of the important people in their lives) over the course of their careers. Even as someone who only knows a little about video games (besides my beloved Switch dabbling), the story felt engaging and compelling throughout. It also felt relevant to artistic aspirations in any form. I think ultimately the novel is about being an artist, and what does it mean to get what you want, and how does it change you? How does making art look different when it’s your job? What happens—when your life is centered on making art, whether you’re paid for it or not—when you stop?
While some things happened in this novel that I did not see coming, and the general arc of it was more than once not what I expected, I was continually impressed by Zevin’s steady hand. I have never been great at giving the precise feedback I know is warranted when I like a thing—in workshops, while reading, sometimes the best I can do is underline a sentence, draw out a string of exclamation marks or write in the margin (vaguely but enthusiastically) the word good. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was—from the series of mornings that I read it sleepy-eyed at the start of the day, from that vague entry point that somehow still had me thinking about it later on, eager to get back—in my very humble fellow fiction writer opinion, good.
Image: Knopf
