Enjoy the following guest post by Peter McDade, a writer and musician I met virtually in a Facebook group. He wrote this article about one of his favorite modern novels. (If you’d like to write a guest post for this blog, please view my guidelines.)
I’M GOING TO BEGIN TELLING you about a book I love by telling you some of the things I don’t love about it. Because the things I don’t love about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow—the award-winning and New York Times bestselling 2024 novel by Gabrielle Zevin—make the things I love about it possible.
It’s too long, for starters. There’s at least one subplot—maybe one-and-a-half subplots—I could have done without, and a tendency for some scenes to go on longer than necessary. Sometimes a big, sprawling book gets away with this, though, the same way good double albums do (or, in the digital world, any album longer than fifty minutes, which is how long single albums used to be). The less successful pieces are too closely connected to the really good stuff to be sliced away, though, and the sense of sprawl becomes a feature, not a bug. Tomorrow is a close study of art and friendship, and the ways technology helps and hurts both. It covers decades in the lives of Sam and Sadie, the friends at the heart of the novel, and that ambition needs some time to uncurl.
It’s also a book about video games, and I have never been a video gamer. I appreciate role-playing games more than first-person shooter games, but even then I prefer to sit and watch someone else play: All that time required to learn the logistics of the controller is time I could spend reading a book or listening to an album. Even though video games are a key part of the plot, the book is not really about video games. The games are crucial to understanding the characters, because the games are the way these characters decode their world, the same way I use music and books to try to make sense of everything, or the way some people find answers in numbers, or pasta, or knitting.
Okay, so why do I love this messy, overlong novel (not) about video games? Because the obsessive, frustrating, addictive thrill of creation is one of my favorite topics. Tomorrow looks at the way these two particular artists develop and understand their own process, and shows us how discovering that process literally saves their lives. As that famous Joyce quote reminds us, “In the particular is contained the universe,” so Tomorrow is really about the way finding your own key to decoding the chaos around you makes everything else in your life possible.
Tomorrow is also about the way we must continually push ourselves to become better. These are flawed people who make big mistakes in their art and in their friendship, but they also help each other understand that, as Zevin writes, “There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s tastes exceed one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.” Sadie and Sam spend the book reaching beyond their own abilities—in trying to create art, in trying to form relationships, in trying to survive in a world driven by money and competition. They stumble and then struggle to restart, get back together again after falling apart. I love this book because that’s how I feel each time I begin work on a new book. I know I won’t succeed on my first attempt, but I also know I won’t be satisfied unless I keep trying to level up.
As drummer for the rock band Uncle Green, Peter McDade spent fifteen years traveling the highways of America in a series of Ford vans. He was able to spend more time writing fiction when the band went into retirement, and recently published King Cal (Trouser Press Books), his third novel. He lives with his family in Atlanta, where he teaches drums and history. Learn more at peterjmcdade.com.
Featured in this post: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin Buy it now
