Book Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Don't worry, it's only a short review (under 400 words)
My copy of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (written by Gabrielle Zevin) was a gift from a friend. As we prepared for an RPG session she handed me two books from her backpack (the other was Murakami’s Novelist as Vocation). Later that night, said friend’s character (a Mean Girls-type high school queen bee) would go on to brutally reject my own (a jock with a flair for the dramatic) in favour of a mathlete-turned-prom king.
Just like the paragraph above T&T&T is a largely plotless book that is as artsy and pretentious as its characters - and is, consequently, exactly my type of read. By the end of the first chapter, I knew it would all be over too soon. And when I finished the story, I read the acknowledgements in full because I still did not want it to end.
The story covers thirty years in the lives of Sadie and Sam and their platonic meet-cutes, and fallings out, and re-meets, and re-fallings out, and so on. Through love and death, career highs and lows, and just about every other milestone you can imagine, Gabrielle Zevin juxtaposes scenes in her characters’ lives without explicitly narrativising the connection. In doing so there is space for the reader.
Non-fiction excels in conveying ideas clearly and succinctly, but fiction relies on the gap between the author’s intent and the reader’s inference to create richness in the text. T&T&T demonstrates that novels (and much of art, generally) manipulate the human urge to attach language to experience. The best do so invisibly.
T&T&T’s characters remind me of the many people I’ve loved. It makes me appreciate the time I’ve spent with them: debating novels and films and video games and the kind of pop culture ephemera that I’m sure was of vital importance for as long as I could remember what it was. That the characters’ lives read as an ongoing conversation, interrupted by life events, demonstrates that talk is the co-creation of a verbal, imaginary world of unlimited potential - and that this is the bedrock of human connection.
Read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow if you want a story that makes you feel nostalgic for the people in your life. Read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow if you want to appreciate what you have in your life today.
See, I told you it was short. If by chance I’ve convinced you to go read T&T&T, leave a like. And if you’ve read it yourself, drop a comment below telling me what you thought of it!
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