Editors Reads Verdict
Gabrielle Zevin's most ambitious and most successful novel is a meditation on creative partnership, love that refuses conventional definition, and the peculiar relationship between making things and being alive — rendered through the unlikely vehicle of the video game industry from the 1990s to the 2020s.
What We Loved
- The creative partnership between Sam and Sadie is rendered with extraordinary psychological depth
- Zevin's knowledge of game design is genuine and the game descriptions are luminous
- The novel asks serious questions about art, love, and work without lecturing
- The non-romantic central relationship is itself a radical formal choice in contemporary fiction
- The prose is beautiful — some of the best literary writing of 2022
Minor Drawbacks
- The scope can feel dense and demanding across its 30-year timeline
- Some readers wanted more resolution in the final act
- Non-gamers may need patience with certain game-culture-specific passages
Key Takeaways
- → Creative collaboration is a form of love that does not reduce to romantic love
- → What we make reveals who we are in ways we cannot always control
- → Success and happiness are not the same axis on any graph
- → Play is a serious human need, not a break from seriousness
- → The people who see our work most clearly are often the ones we find hardest to see clearly ourselves
| Author | Gabrielle Zevin |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Pages | 416 |
| Published | July 5, 2022 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Art Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Literary fiction readers who appreciate ambitious, decades-spanning narratives about creativity, work, and relationships that resist easy categorization. |
A Novel About Making Things
Gabrielle Zevin’s seventh novel is the one that confirmed her place among the most serious literary novelists working in America. Using the video game industry as its vehicle — a choice that initially surprised some literary readers and enchanted others — Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about the central questions of any creative life: why we make things, who we make them with, and what it costs.
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital game room, form a bond over Super Mario Bros., and lose contact for years before reconnecting at Harvard, where Sadie is studying game design and Sam is recovering from the accident that has left him with a permanent limp. Their collaboration on a video game called Ichigo launches a decades-long partnership that generates enormous success, multiple artistic crises, and a relationship that resists every conventional label available to describe relationships between people who love each other.
The Creative Partnership at the Center
Zevin’s most radical formal choice is to place a non-romantic love at the novel’s center and take it as seriously as any love story in contemporary fiction. Sam and Sadie are not lovers, or not primarily — they are collaborators, and Zevin argues that collaboration of this depth is its own form of intimacy, its own form of vulnerability, its own form of heartbreak when it fails.
The specific texture of their creative disagreements — who owns an idea, what credit means, the unbearable vulnerability of showing someone something you’ve made — is rendered with a psychological precision that only comes from a writer who has thought deeply about her own creative process.
The Games as Art
Zevin’s game descriptions are among the novel’s most surprising pleasures. She writes about fictional games with the care a novelist brings to describing paintings or music — as works that embody aesthetic choices with meaning, that create specific worlds with specific moral atmospheres. The question of whether video games are art, which the culture was still debating seriously in the 1990s, is answered here not through argument but through demonstration.
Grief and Creation
The novel’s handling of grief — multiple kinds, arriving at multiple points — is its emotional center. How people continue to create after devastating loss, how art becomes both escape and processing, is explored with a honesty that makes the novel’s final pages hit harder than expected.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the defining literary novels of the 2020s: a decades-spanning meditation on creativity and love that earns every page of its ambition.
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