I have spent a total of zero hours of my life playing video games. I didn’t have a GameBoy as a kid, I’ve never lived in a house with a console, and I’m barely familiar with the basics of the most famous franchises. I’m not saying this with pride, quite the opposite, because I often feel envious of people who do enjoy video games and I’m a little ashamed of having gone through life without being touched by that gigantic industry. I also say it to point out that all this did not prevent me from enjoying (and a lot) one of the most commented novels of the year, Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin.
Video games are important in the novel, after all, the main characters, two unequal friends named Sam and Sadie, create several of them and even found a company that produces them, called Dirty Games, but there are things that matter much more in the book. Very traditional things: the will-or-won’t-do between two characters who have a complex relationship, the classic structure in which there is always something or someone that separates the heroes and the social distance between two protagonists uneven.
Sam, later known as Dedalus, is orphaned by a single mother, suffering from a disability and growing up in Koreatown with his grandparents, who run a pizzeria and Sadie, conventionally attractive, comes from a Jewish family in the less wealthy part of Beverly Hills and born wrapped in various privileges. With all these very classic elements, Zevin has written a novel that is like YA fiction for people who don’t read YA fiction or a video game to people who don’t play video games.
The author, who, like Sam Masur, studied at Harvard in the 1990s (also like Sam, has a mixed Jewish-Korean identity), actually wrote several young adult novels before focusing on books that are marketed to dry adults. , and he has probably taken from that genre several teachings, and all of them very useful. How to order a long novel so that it becomes short, how to alternate rewards and punishments for the reader, and how to seduce with everyday materials.
Although Zevin had already had notable success with a novel not (yet) translated into Spanish or Catalan, The Storied Life of A.J. Flirky, it wasn’t until Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow – the title comes from the Macbeth soliloquy that protagonist Sadie interprets as the ever-postponable death of video games, the infinite possibility of gaining an extra life – that it generated the kind of attention that alters the biorhythms of the publishing industry. Before it was published, there was an auction to obtain the film rights, which Paramount won for two million dollars, and it began to be talked about in terms of a phenomenon.
That kind of warming, we know, doesn’t always benefit the books and doesn’t always have to do with the actual shine of the manuscripts, but we could say that, in this case, the hype is justified. A hype that has been reproduced here. It was among the Sant Jordi best sellers and has generated much passionate and contagious reading.
Who knows if what has captured so many readers is the fact that it dedicates a romantic novel structure to telling a relationship that is not purely romantic, it is friendship and at times rivalry. This, by the way, has it in common with other best sellers of the last decade that have nothing to do with each other, The Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, and So Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, and perhaps one has to wonder if we are in the era of post-love readings.
Also, we conjecture, you will have liked Zevin’s skillful way of making an almost contemporary historical novel: we meet Sam and Sadie in the game room of a hospital in Los Angeles in the nineties and we cross with them the leap from the 20th to the 21st century, as they transition from Super Mario Bros to sophisticated morality cosplay games. And all without the reader getting bored with them.
Gabrielle Zevin Mañana, mañana y mañana / Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow DNA / Periscope Translation into Spanish by N. Molines and into Catalan by E. Riera 502 / 536 p., €20.85
