Sue's Bookshelf: Review of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

The Charlotte Jewish News, October 2022

By Sue Littauer

According to the New York Journal of Books, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” covers themes of sexism, disability and pain, and loss and grief, somehow managing to tie everything together without ever feeling overly complicated. It’s a masterpiece that works on both a grand scale, and a minute, more intimate one.

I was excited to see that Gabrielle Zevin, author of “The Storied Life of AJ Fickry” and “Young Jane Young,” wrote a new book, and I immediately put it on reserve. That said, I didn’t realize “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” was about gaming — video gaming to be precise. Since I’ve never actually played a video game (unless you count bowling on Nintendo Switch with my grandson, Jacob, which I’m actually pretty good at), I almost decided to discontinue reading the book. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to put it completely aside.

“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” is a brilliant book on so many levels. It is the story of Sam, Sadie, and Marx, the complicated triangle that serves as the book’s central characters. Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital when they are 11 years old. Sam is a patient recovering from a traumatic car accident that killed his mother, and Sadie is visiting her sister, who is a cancer patient on the same floor. Sam has withdrawn into himself

until he meets Sadie, and they form a close bond playing video games. Sam’s trust in Sadie is destroyed when he finds out Sadie, upon her mother’s urging, is using her visits to Sam to fulfill community service hours for her bat mitzvah project. Sam’s rejection of Sadie continues for many years until they

meet by chance in the T station in Boston. Sam is a student at Harvard, and Sadie is at MIT. They rekindle their friendship and decide to work together on their mutual passion and shared dream to design a video game. The game is a huge success commercially, and their partnership develops into a very successful company. It is managed by Sam’s wealthy and brilliant roommate, Marx. The three of them work together in game design, development, marketing, and production. Conflicts arise over vision, creativity, shared credit, commercial success vs. intellectual values, and, of course, romance. Sadie and Marx eventually fall in love, leaving Sam to beat himself up over never pursuing a romantic relationship with Sadie. However, Sam and Sadie are soulmates, and their love endures throughout their lifetime.

This review so far is an over-simplification of the book. There are varied detailed descriptions of video games throughout. The book explains the appeal video games have. We see how we can escape from the real world and our problems by entering a virtual world. We realize the choices we make as we play, and the paths we follow don’t necessarily determine the course of our virtual life; we can always start over and follow a different path tomorrow.

Our next Center for Jewish Education Book Club will meet on November 9 at 10:30 a.m. at Shalom Park. The book we will be discussing is “Morningside Heights” by Joshua Henkin. Both “Morningside Heights” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” can be found in the collection at the Levine-Sklut Judaic Library and Resource Center.

For more information, please contact sueb.littauer@jewishcharlotte.org.