My first book of 2024 turned out to be a success, which I take as a sign that it is going to be a good year. The title of this book is, of course, taken from a famous Shakespeare soliloquy spoken by Macbeth:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more. It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
One of the problems I have with watching productions of Macbeth is that I get distracted by the multitude of book titles strewn throughout the dialogue. This is not Shakespeare's fault; he could not have known that his words would grace the covers of scads of books. And now we have one more.
This is not a novel about Shakespeare and only a small and peripheral part of the story is about a production of Macbeth. It is a story about gamers and the people who create games. What does this soliloquy have to do with games, you may ask? Well, as one character asks, "What is a game?"
It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent because nothing is permanent, ever.
Sam and Sadie meet as children and become friends through their love of games. Later they become game creators and start a successful game company. I am not a gamer. The only games I can remember playing were Pong and Tetris. But despite that, I loved this novel.
This is not a plot driven novel - stories about lives seldom are because lives aren't particularly plot driven - but I did find it to be a bit of a page turner. This is the story of two complicated characters who have the kind of love/hate relationship that many famous collaborators have. Mike Love and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys feuded for years. Darryl Hall recently got a restraining order against John Oates. Richard Rogers was famously frustrated by his first lyricist, Lorenz Hart.
Through much of this novel, as the characters came together and then drifted apart only to come together again over a 30 year period, I was afraid that Zevin would give in to the temptation to make them lovers. After all, Harry told Sally that men and women could never really be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. But as Sadie tells Sam, lovers are common; true collaborators are rare. And don't most of us go through life working with people that we never even consider having romantic relationships with?
These are not easy characters to love; each is stubborn and at different points in the novel convinced that they are right even though they are so clearly wrong. Each has issues that arise in their lives that make it difficult for them to move forward when the other needs them to move forward. There are misunderstandings. There are very sad moments. They each have different visions for what they want to accomplish: Sadie wants to create art; Sam wants to create entertainment . Their arguments through the years are intense. Zevin captured the reality of life and collaborative relationships with these two. This would be a great book club book for those book clubs that treat characters as real people and argue about whether they "like" or "agree" with them.
Zevin also manages to work in many interesting life issues for the characters: Sam is an Asian American who sometimes feels he doesn't belong; Sam is also physically disabled although he doesn't like to think of himself that way; Sadie deals with sexism in a male dominated industry; both of them deal with death and loss; there are discussions about cultural appropriation; same sex marriage and people's opposition to it come up; and it even deals with how good intentions can inadvertently lead to tragedy. Zevin takes her time with these issues and gives us moral complexities as complicated as they are in real life.
One thing I found interesting was that I very much related to Sadie and the issues she faced as a woman in a male dominated university and career while at the same time thinking she was wrong much of the time and disagreeing with her choices. I like when authors create complicated characters like that. Of the two, I found her less likeable than Sam but Sam had his issues too.
As a former corporate lawyer I also thought she captured the challenges of partners starting a company very well.
The only time my attention flagged was in the penultimate section of the novel, where she creates someone playing one of the immersive games. Apparently these games work like stories where the player becomes a character in the story and can make certain choices, while other people that they don't know are other characters interacting with them. Maybe because I don't game, I got a little bored with this section even though I figured out fairly early what Zevin was trying to accomplish by including this. But this isn't a long portion of the novel and it is a minor quibble.
There was so much hype about this novel that I wondered if I would like it as much as others seemed to. I did. I happy to be able to recommend this first novel of the year. If you like character driven novels you should like it. Even if you like plot driven novels, you should find it readable. It does give a real sense of the time periods in which it is set and the locales. And while I didn't find any sentences or paragraphs that made me stop and say "what great writing!" I did think it was well written.
