Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle ZevinTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, relationship fiction
Pages: 416
Published by Knopf Publishing Group on July 5, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

My Review:

That “Love is all there is, is all we know of Love” is from the pen of Emily Dickinson, a poet who was near and dear to Sadie Green’s heart. But Dickinson’s poem, as ineffably true as it is, does not specify the type of love to which it refers. It’s often taken to mean romantic love. In this story, while there is plenty of love to go around, the form of love at its heart is not Eros but Philia, the love of friends and equals.

The relationship that stars, and sings, and occasionally weeps with grief or is frozen by neglect and misunderstanding in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is the 30 year friendship and partnership between Sam Masur and Sadie Green, who meet at a children’s hospital in New York when they are on the cusp of adolescence.

They are both stuck at that hospital. Sam is about to undergo yet another surgery to stabilize the damage to his foot that he incurred during the accident that killed his mother. Sadie has been shuffled out of her sister’s room because Alice, who has leukemia, is also being a temperamental bitch to her younger sister – and their parents are indulging Alice because, after all, she has cancer and Sadie is healthy.

Sam and Sadie discover that they both LOVE computer games. Love to play them, love to talk about them, love to share them with anyone who will listen – which mostly means each other.

But Sam thinks Sadie is his friend – and he’s not wrong. But Sadie starts out thinking that helping Sam while away the hours is her public service project for her upcoming Bat Mitzvah. The revelation of her deception breaks them in two.

Until they meet again in Boston, where Sadie is now going to Harvard while Sam is at MIT. And their friendship knits itself and them back together as though they had never parted – although the faultline created in that first and biggest deception lies deeply buried and waiting to erupt again.

The friendship between Sam and Sadie, in all its depth and all its incipient heartbreak, is rooted in their shared love of gaming. It’s the mid-1990s, and computer and video gaming is at that golden age where it has become a big business but the games can still be built by just a few dedicated people who are willing to eat, sleep and breathe the game until it comes out or they burnout – whichever comes first.

Sam and Sadie, with the help of Sam’s roommate Marx, decide to make a game. They sacrifice their senior year in college to do it. And the rest, as they say, is history. Just not the one anyone would expect.

Escape Rating B-: Everyone seems to love this book. The ratings on both Goodreads and Amazon are at 4.4 out of 5. I’m saying this up front because I have to say that I’m just not seeing it – or at least not seeing it the way that so many people seem to.

For me, at least, this one sits on the border between relationship fiction and literary fiction, with a bit too much of a tilt towards the litfic side – which is not my personal preference.

At the same time, I loved the parts about the video game industry. I played many of the games referred to in the story, and still play video games. The way their company starts out, how it develops, the fights, the ups and the downs, reminded me fondly of the reporting on the industry at the time.

But the video game industry is used more as a vehicle than anything else. It’s about the work of being an entrepreneur at a time when the work can be done by a small, intimate group who live for each other, die for each other, and breathe each other’s air, day in and day out until the work is done.

And then they start all over again because the work is an integral part of the love they have for each other. And it’s also the central point of gaming as a whole, that there’s always another game, another life, and that endings are never permanent. Until they are.

More than anything else, Tomorrow is the story of a 30-year friendship between two very scared and flawed people who love each other and more importantly know each other more and better than anyone else in their lives. Even though they grow apart as often as they grow together, they’re still in reference to each other no matter what.

So I loved the video game parts, both the playing of them and the discussion of them and especially the creation of them. And the way their friendship ebbed and flowed turned these characters into real people. Almost as if they were the player characters in a game that I was playing rather than a book I was reading.

But the last third of the book felt rather more literary fiction than relationship as the situation got bleaker and bleaker and it seemed as if there was no light at the end of that tunnel that the story was dragging towards. It read like the full quote from Macbeth that the title is taken from was a bit too much of a metaphor for the entire book.

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.

Clearly, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing, and probably will for quite some time. There is one thing about the story, or at least about something that is often said about it, about which I have no mixed feelings at all.

There have been quite a few comparisons drawn between Tomorrow and Ready Player One, including among my reading group which probably led me astray. It seems like an easy choice, as both stories are imbued with nostalgia for what are now classic games. But Ready Player One is an action-packed adventure story. It has a pace and a verve that keep the reader compulsively following the action. Tomorrow is a much quieter, slower-paced story. Obviously, both of them have massive audiences. And there will be some overlap between those audiences. But readers coming into Tomorrow thinking it will be like Ready Player One are going to be in for one hell of a disappointing shock and probably vice versa. An opinion which is very much my 2 cents and your reading mileage may vary.

Review: Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Review: Clock Dance by Anne TylerClock Dance by Anne Tyler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction
Pages: 304
Published by Knopf Publishing Group on July 10, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

A bewitching new novel of family and self-discovery from the best-selling, award-winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread.

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot, she drops everything and flies across the country to Baltimore. The impulsive decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter will lead Willa into uncharted territory--surrounded by eccentric neighbors, plunged into the rituals that make a community a family, and forced to find solace in unexpected places. A bittersweet, probing novel of hope and grief, fulfillment and renewal, Clock Dance gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers.

My Review:

Willa Drake is living a life of such quiet desperation that she never quite realized just how desperate she’s become. And just how much of an apologetic doormat she is in her own life. Until circumstances, along with a tiny bit of her own once and future spark, finally crack open, not even a doorway, but at least a window out.

We all tend to marry types, and Willa’s first husband was a real jerk. Her second is an ass. Not quite an asshole, but certainly an ass. And her older son takes after his father – her first husband. But both of them condescend to Willa at every turn, and act like the world revolves around them, because Willa does everything she can to enable them to maintain that belief.

Her second son, who we don’t see all that much of, takes after her. She patterned her own behavior on her father, a quiet, saintly man who married a most likely bipolar or manic depressive drama queen.

The idea that a person either marries Gandhi or becomes Gandhi is depressing as hell, and it’s an idea that Willa seems to have embraced wholeheartedly. She’s been the Gandhi in every relationship – the saintly one who enables everything and forgives everyone all of their trespasses.

And, as one of the characters says, it must be frustrating to be married to such a person because the non-Gandhi always feels guilty, bitter or both pretty much all the time. It also means that the Gandhi-type enables all of their partner’s bad behavior, including abuse, and does not deal with the damage that is being done to any innocents in the household.

Like the children. Willa and her sister Elaine were both abused by their mother, but dealt with it in different ways. Elaine is distant and self-absorbed, Elaine makes peace at any and all costs. Neither is a particularly healthy way to deal.

But this story is finally about Willa breaking free. It happens almost by accident. Her son’s ex-girlfriend is hospitalized, leaving her 9-year-old daughter with nobody and no place. Not that little Cheryl isn’t surprisingly independent, but she’s still too young to be living by herself.

In a fluke, a neighbor calls Willa. And Willa, empty-nesting and looking for a purpose other than mollifying her husband, jumps at the chance to fly from Tucson to Baltimore to take care of a child she’s never even met.

Oh, so slowly, and oh so cautiously, Willa steps further and further out from that life of quiet self-effacement and desperation. And sets herself free.

Escape Rating C+: So many people love Anne Tyler, and I have so many friends who read literary fiction. It’s the stuff of the best seller lists after all. But I usually bounce right off of it, because the stories are so grim, the characters are so quiet, and so little happens.

And that’s kind of true in Clock Dance. The first half of the book was rough going for me. Until the point where Willa agrees to go to Baltimore, it’s so easy to see her making one mistake after another. The way that she gets into (and actually out of) her first marriage is depressing in its predictability. It’s sad to see that when we meet her again years later, she’s essentially recreated the same dynamic with her second husband.

It’s only when she goes to Baltimore to take care of Cheryl and her mother Denise that the story begins to move – just as Willa does. In her own life everyone treats her as a doormat. Her husband even calls her “little one” in a way that is as demeaning as it gets.

But with Cheryl and Denise and their working middle class neighborhood, Willa rediscovers the purpose that she lost along the way. It’s not that she becomes selfish, it’s that she’s helping others who also give back in return. She’s part of the community, not a servant to select members of it.

Her rebellion is as quiet as her desperation, and seems to take her forever to finally achieve – because it takes her forever to finally acknowledge her own wants and needs after years of looking after everyone else.

I wasn’t so much moved by this story as I was frustrated by it. A big part of me wanted this to be women’s fiction rather than literary fiction – because there would be more plot, more action, and more of a sense of resolution at the end. And the first depressing half would have ended a lot quicker.

The most forthright person in the story is young Cheryl. For a 9-year-old she’s pretty self-aware and knows who she is and what she wants. She’s certainly more self-aware than Willa. Willa has been such a cipher in her own life that she continues to be a cipher even when she’s the heroine. Most of her self-talk is utterly self-effacing. I’m not saying that she’s not realistic, because I’m all too aware that she is.

People, particularly women, often “settle” instead of striving. We’ve all done it at times in our lives, often for reasons that seem good at the time. But just because her character is ultra-realistic doesn’t make a book with her at the center all that enjoyable. More like a bit depressing until the very, very end.

If you love literary fiction, this is a book you’ll probably enjoy. If, like me, you have your doubts about litfic, this one won’t change your mind.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Review: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Review: Warlight by Michael OndaatjeWarlight by Michael Ondaatje
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, literary fiction, World War II
Pages: 304
Published by Knopf Publishing Group on May 8, 2018
Publisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.

In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.

My Review:

I picked this one up because of the World War II angle. It sounded like a combination of coming-of-age and voyage of discovery. At least it sounded like a boy with a murky past grows up and discovers what the murk was all about.

But it isn’t. Or he doesn’t. Perhaps a little bit of both.

The beginning is certainly promising. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his 16-year-old sister Rachel are left in the guardianship of someone who begins as a temporary lodger in their house – at least as far as the children know. It is 1945 and the war is over. But for Nathaniel and Rachel, it seems as if the peace is going to be even more dangerous than the war.

Warlight is the semi-luminous shadowed darkness that existed at night, in Britain, under the blackout of World War II. Things were only seen in shadow, and people acted in that shadow.

In this story, the shadowy deeds conducted in that warlight continue to haunt the post-war period, and it is the warlight of his memory that Nathaniel attempts to navigate.

The first part of the book takes place during that immediate post-war period, when Nathaniel and Rachel are abandoned in the care of a man they nickname ‘The Moth’. They believe he might be a criminal. Certainly the lives that Nathaniel and Rachel lead while under his care are highly irregular, as are the characters that come to inhabit that life.

Those post-war, post-Blitz years are highly chaotic, and so is everything that surrounds them. But our perspective of those years is through Nathaniel’s memories, viewed through the lens of his adulthood in the 1950s, and his work with an unnamed secret agency, probably MI5 or MI6. His job is to sanitize the parts of the war that were conducted in a grey area. Probably in very deep shades of grey. Shades that seemed as if they were conducted ‘for the greater good’ in wartime, but that in peacetime are going to appear pretty damning. If they ever come to light.

It’s part of Nathaniel’s job to see that they don’t.

But his real purpose in the depths of that nameless agency is to hunt for traces of his mother. Because during the war, she was one of those people who operated in that grey. And during the peace, the results of those actions eventually came for her.

Nathaniel wants to learn why. Not just that why, but all the whys. And his search leads him back into his memories – and back into the grey warlight.

Escape Rating B-: I’m not actually sure I escaped anywhere with this one. It’s a weird book. From the description, I expected something more definitive, at least in the part of the book where Nathaniel is an adult and is searching for the past and the truth about that past.

But it doesn’t feel like there are any truly definitive events, at least until the very end when Nathaniel reconstructs what he thinks happened. But even then, he doesn’t really know, he’s only guessing.

And he is a very unreliable narrator. He doesn’t find much in the way of names and dates and places and documentation of any of the above. He finds bits and pieces and suppositions and suggestive blank spaces, both because his mother deliberately tried to erase her past and because the agency she worked for has erased anything murky in its past, and a lot of that murk is wrapped around his mother and her colleagues – many of whom were people that Nathaniel knew and didn’t know, both at the same time.

This is a book that I think people are either going to love or hate, but not much in the middle. It is very much literary fiction, in that it meanders a lot and not a lot clearly happens. But underneath that it says a lot of interesting things about what is condoned in war and condemned in peace, and the lengths that people and governments will go to in order to make sure that certain truths don’t ever see the full light of day.

Review: The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P.D. James

Review: The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P.D. JamesThe Mistletoe Murder: And Other Stories by P.D. James
Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 152
Published by Knopf Publishing Group on October 25th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Four previously uncollected stories from one of the great mystery writers of our time--swift, cunning murder mysteries (two of which feature the young Adam Dalgliesh) that together, to borrow the author's own word, add up to a delightful "entertainment." The newly appointed Sgt. Dalgliesh is drawn into a case that is "pure Agatha Christie." . . . A "pedantic, respectable, censorious" clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward as a witness to a murder . . . A best-selling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier . . . Dalgliesh's godfather implores him to reinvestigate a notorious murder that might ease the godfather's mind about an inheritance, but which will reveal a truth that even the supremely upstanding Adam Dalgliesh will keep to himself. Each of these stories is as playful as it is ingeniously plotted, the author's sly humor as evident as her hallmark narrative elegance and shrewd understanding of some of the most complex--not to say the most damning--aspects of human nature. A treat for P. D. James's legions of fans and anyone who enjoys the pleasures of a masterfully wrought whodunit.

My Review:

I was in the mood for something mystery-ish, and in need of a short book, when I ran across Kristine Kathryn Rusch’ review of The Mistletoe Murder. Not only was her review very positive, but she reminded me of all the reasons that I loved the late, lamented P.D. James’ work. I got hooked on Dalgliesh after seeing it on PBS, many, many moons ago, and read the whole series. So discovering that this collection included a couple of new-to-me Dalgliesh stories sealed my fate.

This is a collection of four stories, two set in the early years of Adam Dalgliesh’ career, but the other two set longer ago and farther afield. But all of the stories take place during the Christmas season, no matter what the year.

The title story, The Mistletoe Murder, is chilling. Part of that chill is in the evolution of the amateur detective’s perspective, as she finds herself both wanting to solve the murder and deciding to act as judge and jury in rather peculiar circumstances. That the mystery is ripped from the pages of the author’s own past just adds to its appeal. What makes this story stand out is its ending. The final revelation makes both the amateur detective and the reader re-think everything that has happened.

The second story, A Very Commonplace Murder is also a fairly commonplace mystery. For this reader, it was the one disappointment in the collection. The outcome was both sad and predictable. Although the story, like its narrator, attempted to be clever about the outcome, it felt a bit hackneyed. And sad.

cover her face by pd jamesThe final two stories were the Dalgliesh stories. The last story first, because it comes first in the character’s history, even before the first published book in the series, Cover Her Face. In The Twelve Clues of Christmas the future Scotland Yard Commander is a mere Sergeant at the Met, and while early in his career, is already considered an up and coming officer with a brain in his head and a bright future ahead of him. This is a case he gets dragged into on his way to his aunt’s for Christmas, unfortunately for the perpetrators. They thought they’d be pulling a fast one on a local copper. The nice thing about this story is that not only does the young Dalgliesh figure out the deception, but so does the local inspector who has been pulled away from his Christmas dinner to wrap up the case.

And finally the remaining story in the collection, The Boxdale Inheritance. At this point, Dalgliesh is in the middle of what has already become a stellar career. Based on his rank at the Met, this story takes place around the time of Shroud for a Nightingale. But the case he is confronted with has nothing to do with anything that has crossed his desk at work. Instead, the case is brought to him by his godfather, an Anglican clergyman with a sticky sense of right and wrong. Canon Hubert Boxdale is the recipient of a large bequest from a woman he calls Great Aunt Allie. As much as the elderly Canon needs the money, he refuses to accept it if it is tainted, and it very well might be. Over 60 years ago Great Aunt Allie was acquitted of murdering her husband, even though everyone in the courtroom believed that she committed the crime that gave her all that delicious money. So Adam agrees to look into whether or not justice was done all those years ago. The truth, after all, is still out there. But the way that he works around to it shows off all of his skills at detection.

Escape Rating A-: This is a terrific collection for fans of the author and her most famous character. It reminded me just how much I miss Dalgliesh, particularly the early books. They are both missed and it was a treat to visit them again, however briefly. And The Mistletoe Murder is simply an excellent story, both as a mystery and as a character study.

If you find yourself in a mystery mood, this is a great introduction to the author and her work, or serves as a delightful visit with an old and dear friend.