“Three decades of friendship and creative collaboration between two video-game designers, from Harvard in the early 1990s through the early 2010s.”
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is Gabrielle Zevin's 2022 novel, the breakout literary commercial novel of that year and one of the canonical contemporary American novels about friendship and creative work. Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a Los Angeles children's hospital game room in 1987 and reconnect at Harvard in 1995. Sam is a math student at Harvard with a chronic foot injury from a childhood car accident; Sadie is an MIT computer-science student working on a game-design thesis. They make a game together. The game (Ichigo) becomes a commercial hit, they start a studio in Venice Beach, and the novel runs the next twenty years of their creative partnership, their separate romantic lives, the third partner (Marx, their producer) who holds the studio together, and a back-third tragedy that re-frames the entire structure of the book.
Zevin's project is to write a literary novel that takes the medium of video games as seriously as literary fiction has historically taken painting, music, or film. The technical material (the 1995-era engine constraints, the Ichigo-to-Both Sides commercial trajectory, the studio politics of the late-90s gaming industry) is rendered with the kind of research-backed specificity that lifts the novel above its commercial-fiction shelf. The Sam-and-Sadie central relationship is the most carefully drawn long-arc creative-partnership friendship in contemporary American literary fiction; Zevin's discipline is to refuse to make it a romance and to refuse to let the reader off the hook for wanting it to be one. The Marx subplot in the back half is one of the structural masterstrokes of the decade.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Zevin entry point, and for fans of A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara), Normal People (Sally Rooney), and the broader contemporary literary-friendship subgenre. The Jennifer Kim / Julia Whelan audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. Read The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry next.
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