I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The choice to pick this up was spurred by NYTimes' list of 100 best books of the century, where it polled on readers' list and the critics' polled list. Plus the log line seemed interesting to me: two creatives charting a path from mid 90s to mid 2010s video gaming industry, years that squarely line up with my growing up and playing video games (although maybe a decade or so older than the characters of the book).
And I thought the premise of the book remains interesting (a bit of Halt & Catch Fire in there, the latter seasons), but I was struck by how poor some of the dialogue and characterizations were. Every conversation feels like an anvil dropped on the reader's head to drive home the point, and not to mention that Sam and Sadie in their childhood talk like no children ever (but I am willing to look past that). But the rest of the book isn't better in that department. It feels very trite in places, as if not giving its readers the benefit of the doubt and has to spell out everything in plainspoken manner. A chief culprit of it is some moralizing that the writer wants to impart, like Sadie berating Sam about how he let her go to her lover even though he had power over him and he knew she would jump into a bad relationship. It was like reading a bad 2018 twitter thread. The metaphors in the book are laboured and drilled with a maudlin, treacly sentimentality.
That brings me to the characters. What the hell is this Marx character? Look, a lot of very famous men rightly get a lot of shit on the internet for writing shallow women, defined almost by their physicality and their relationship to men, and objectified horribly. Well, allow me to talk about Marx, a man dreamed up to be so perfect as to not even be human. It's like the author's every yearning teen fantasy come to life (hey, what's fiction for if not that? I get it, sister!). His flaws are so adorable (he's a womanizer, but damn it, the women can't stop falling in love with the guy), he's blessed with the looks of a Greek god and the kind heart of a saint. He is a non-character. Talk about manic pixie dream boy.
And finally, I feel like a lot of this book, which takes place in the 90s, seems to have been written squarely to land in the good books of twitterati in 2018. Like the author is very concerned about being on the right side of history, and have their characters be so progressive and almost holier-than-thou to render the time period moot.
That's my rant, but I wanted to get capture my thoughts. There is a lot of good in this book despite whatever I have spewed above. The hook of friends who never turn lovers, a creative marriage, in a changing time for an industry that has been the realm of nerds and to bring it to the fore, is a job well done. The novel clips by, it is a breezy read, and doesn't punish you for sticking by its 400 page count.
I just wish I hadn't found a lot of it just so amateurish in places.
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