Gabrielle Zevin’s novel about friendship in the gaming industry has received rave reviews, but Sam Brooks finds enough gremlins and glitches to amount to a failure on almost every level.

There are two pieces of art that came to mind when I was reading Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (hereafter TTT for obvious reasons).

The first is Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s wish fulfilment sci-fi that was later improved on by Steven Spielberg’s film. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow features, at its heart, two people, Sam and Sadie, who bond over Super Mario when the former is recovering from a traumatic car accident. They have a falling out, but then reconnect in university and end up working in game development together, a friendship that Zevin follows from both sides of the story.

It compares favourably to Cline’s novel, admittedly. Zevin’s protagonists are very rarely toxic, and when they behave badly, the people around them react accordingly. This novel is only nakedly manipulative a few times. It’s when Zevin throws in a pop culture reference that it feels the most like Cline’s magnum opus (not a compliment). Every reference lands with a hollow thunk, the assumption of meaning rather than the resonance of depth.

That’s because TTT, even outside the title, features close to 100 distinct pop culture references in its 350-odd pages. To wit: Metal Gear Solid, Twelfth Night, Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’, Tetris, The Hero’s Journey, The Legend of Zelda, The White Album, General Hospital, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’. And so on and so forth.

These are not specific pop culture references – being familiar with these references indicates that a character simply exists in the world. These are some of the most ubiquitous and well-loved pieces of culture of the past 30 years. It’s a technique, if it can be called that, that draws from the Tumblr era; where one defined their personality, and their sense of self, by what art they liked, rather than what they did or who they were. Using references to define one’s character, or characters in this case, isn’t inherently bad, but it’s a flimsy shortcut and one that fails to suggest depth or specificity indicating character depth and idiosyncrasy.

When Sadie and Sam bond over Super Mario in the hospital, that’s a character building moment. It’s a moment where we understand the kind of kid who refuses to speak to anybody else in the hospital because he is entirely submerged in his video game, until another kid in the hospital happens upon him playing it, and she happens to love the game. They bond over it. It’s lovely, actually.

By the time the novel ends, Sadie and Sam are barely distinct from any adult born in the 80s who have any vague interest in pop culture. Even more egregious, they are barely distinct from anybody who has a vague interest in gaming. The most obscure game referenced is Suikoden, the cult JRPG from the 90s, and even then that is dropped as one title in a clunky list. One reference can help us understand a character, a little kick of flavour to help define a dish. One hundred references gives us all flavour, and you end up forgetting any sense of a dish entirely.

Which brings me to the other reference point that scratched the back of my mind while reading: Richard Linklater’s Before series. The films, which check in on a couple, Jesse and Celine, every nine years, are an often raw look at how age, time and love collide with each other, sometimes beautifully, often not.

TTT follows Sam and Sadie through 20 years of friendship. They make games together with their friend Marx Watanabe (sure), they have heartbreaks, professional and private setbacks and yes, even tragedy. Zevin tells this with detached omniscience, occasionally taking us out of the present day to drop in a quote from a future interview or TedTalk. It’s a clever trick, and allows her to build these characters outside of their own perspective.

It also leads to some distractingly flat prose. Take this, from about halfway through the book, when Sadie is 23.

“She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and non-fiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too.”

Sure, it’s an economical way to convey information. But it feels like just that – a list of qualities that really, could be anybody. The Before series is profound because of how wildly specific Jesse and Celine’s relationship is; how their relationship spools out from that first chance meeting in Vienna. We feel for them so hard because we see ourselves in their strange little quirks, like looking through a window and accidentally catching your own reflection. We relate, a little too hard.

Zevin goes too far in the other direction: by making Sadie feel like everywoman, she feels like literally no woman. (This is especially disappointing, given Zevin wrote the excellent, underseen indie film Conversations with Other Women, which leans hard into the Before trilogy’s territory.) Sam fares a little better, and Zevin’s sympathies seem to lie here rather than with Sadie; Sam’s traumatic backstory (car accident, dead parent) gets more focus, while Sadie’s trauma (abusive relationship, pregnancy woes) is limited to the present. By the end of the story, it’s hard to tell why we’re following these characters and their journey together at all; they seem linked together only by virtue of being in the same pages, not because anything that has been written convinces us they should be together. People don’t interact like this unless someone is writing toward a foregone conclusion.

Unfortunately, Zevin’s flat writing isn’t reserved only for her characters. It’s throughout the book. Action and plot are written as though they’re going to be adapted for screen later, which is true in this case; the rights were snapped up over a year before the novel was even released. Dialogue is strictly economical, characters diagnose each other and themselves (“I am, as you know a bottomless pit of ambition and need)”, like shady tweets from people who are too online. Interiority is sacrificed for swift action, showing everything and telling us nothing. Although, I’m not sure if I’d prefer reading the interior lives of these characters based on the rest of the writing.

This frankly, extends to the entire conceit. A book about the journey of two developers who come together as close friends through their love of gaming, and their various ups and downs in the industry, is a great idea. However, Zevin’s execution almost entirely dances around realities that we now know to be deeply ingrained in the game industry – sexism, racism, worker exploitation – to tell a story that really, could be about any industry. One eleventh hour incursion into an actual game (that so badly misunderstands how MMORPGs and communication therein works) doesn’t fix that. The game industry feels like an unshapely tote bag, unsuited to carry anything that Zevin has bunged into it.

When I got to the end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I felt like I’d gotten to the end of a bad game. A game that had promise, but in which a litany of glitches, design flaws and awkward mechanics distracted me from anything that might’ve been good about it. We can forgive a glitchy game if the soul is there. If it’s not there, all you’ve got is a bad game. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a failure on pretty much every level, but if it had a little bit more soul (and frankly, a lot more craft), it’d be fine.

The film might still be decent, though.

The first novel was born when a burst of inspiration met a Masters in Creative Writing deadline. But Sharon Lam has found everything from self doubt to Adam Sandler will get in the way of the second book.

It is impossible to write a second novel. After all, you just published your first novel, then realise that “just” is actually three years ago, and you haven’t done shit. That’s not to say you haven’t thought about another novel. Not during the first year, of course. The first year after publishing a novel you can rest easy, you owe the world nothing, it’s 365 days of long-haul flight mentality. More Pringles please. Yes, an Adam Sandler movie does sound great right now. A little known but completely true fact is that with each ISBN to your name, you get one year judgment-free where you can watch as many Adam Sandler movies as you want and your cred won’t go down. Even if you don’t like Adam Sandler movies, you may as well watch them now while you can, so you do.

The second year you stop rewatching Big Daddy and relearn how to read. You look for literary seeds. While you’re looking for your phone, you’re also looking for your new novel. Is It In My Bag – it’s not there, she thought, she had to find it… before The Others find it. On the Floor – it’s about surfaces… the surface of life. In the residual glow of debut novel delusion, every idea seems good. The best one you have is about a government development which becomes delayed after the construction site becomes plagued by birds so the government makes birds illegal. Yeah, you think, this is great. It’ll write itself. Another year passes. It hasn’t written itself. And while it’s not exactly birds, the government has made boars illegal. You’ve procrastinated so long that life has imitated art before you even made the art.

So now here you are, in the third year. You feel that your single published novel was a fluke and are worried that if you try to write a second you’ll prove yourself right. After all, you arrived at your first novel by rolling down the path of least resistance at the time – you didn’t want to get a job, so you applied to writing school. It worked, you were accepted and bought yourself another year, another Master’s degree, two in a row, which unfortunately you did not get for the price of one. You have no tertiary sanctuary now, there is literally no external reason to write another book. 

“The obvious difference is that all the heat and light and pressure of our MA year at the IIML is missing,” Clare Moleta, author of Unsheltered (2021), writes to you. You worked on your first drafts of your first novels together in the same cohort. “The community, the deadlines, the constant exposure to craft and ideas… without that collective engine, a book is just one more thing you’re trying to fit into your life, on your own. A writer I admire told me recently that he reckons, after the first one, writing novels is mostly willpower.” 

That’s the thing about a second novel — you’ve already done one. Who climbs Everest twice? “And when you finally get to the end, you think, OK, now I know how to write a book. But actually what you know is how to write that book. It doesn’t take care of the next one,” Clare writes. She also mentions that she started her second novel while revising her first novel, and finished the first draft a couple of months ago, a process of four years vs eight months. 

You ask some other novelists who have written and published not only a second novel, but thirds, fourths, sixths. Brannavan Gnanalingam, most recently of Slow Down, You’re Here (2022), tells you that his second attempt was a “dud”, and a “failure in all respects”. And so he “threw it in the bin. Moved to Paris. Chatted to writers. And wrote my actual second novel in the second person with much more purpose and precision.” This would become You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here (2013), which Brannavan also says is his favourite. His discarded second novel, “is never to be seen/read again, and if anyone tries to publish it Harper Lee style after my death, I firmly and on the record state, I disavow it.” 

Murdoch Stephens, most recently of Down from Upland (2022), wrote his second novel under a pseudonym. He writes that this “took me out of writing a traditional novel structure and allowed me to write through the voice of a character. Just to be clear: I wasn’t hiding behind anonymity, but was creating a world through the voice of a character-as-author”. Murdoch also wrote “a PhD, an academic book, tonnes of articles including for The Spinoff, and then a popular non-fiction book really helped me think through writing as a broad vocation.” 

Everyone’s words are reassuring to you. You realise how disconnected from people you’ve been, and how that’s also an important part of writing. Writing a second novel isn’t impossible, it just takes time and work (ugh!). But false starts, traversing other mediums, a change in tools, are also part of the process. Perhaps in your three years you’ve already begun without knowing it. And now you have some solid tips. You will first knock out that “modern” (see: unsellable) children’s book you’ve been sitting on, move to Paris, and start writing under the name “Adam Sandler”.

Then all you need is a new idea, since you’ve scrapped the illegal bird idea because it’s not as fun in illegal boar reality. It’s hard to think of an idea though when nothing has really ever happened to you. You are Charlie Bucket’s grandparents who stayed in bed, Holden Caulfield’s unnamed cousin, the not that hungry caterpillar. Of course, it’s fiction, everything is made up. But there needs to be a bigger truth behind the stuff you make up, otherwise all you’re writing is an episode of the Big Bang Theory. You’re aware that whatever truth you’ve mustered throughout your cushy life was already milked and re-milked for your first novel. Perhaps you need to actually live more first? But how do you do that when you don’t have any incentive to steal a top government document, nor some kind of cursed medallion, nor are you the doppelganger of an Italian popstar? 

However you find an idea, you can then start writing. Originally you wanted to finish another novel in your twenties but time is running out, so maybe you should just wait for your thirties. Or forties, so it starts with an even number? Maybe you’ll have outgrown TV and sleeping by then. You also still need to get through what they call “severe depressive episodes” where for weeks at a time you can’t even see tomorrow. And perhaps you should also clean the toilet and do the laundry first so you won’t have distractions later. And then once you’ve done that, all you need to do is just sit down for half an hour each day to work on it and wait for the rhythm and habit to kick in and soon you’ll be writing for an hour or two a day but not right now because you’re a bit sleepy and you need to catch up on post-episode discussions about your shows on Reddit.

Above all, it still feels impossible to write a second novel because the sieve-wielding person in charge of collecting water from the well of potential is once again out to sabotage you. You think they’re being protective, preventing your failure by preventing your attempt. That person is of course, you, and you can’t just go and murder them because you’d be killing yourself as well – wait! That could be a novel! And then you realise that it already is, and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote it 176 years ago.