Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Game is Rigged

 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Gabrielle Zevin; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; fantasy; Sadie Sam characters; Play; Gaming's limits

How weird to be reading a book about gaming (something that I do very little of) while learning about playing games at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting from a neuroscientist, Mark Solms.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Banquo’s cry of lament after losing his wife in MacBeth.  The speech – and therefore the book – is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life – its brevity, but also our unwillingness to admit that.  Indeed, the criticisms of online games at the conference were two; one that the interactions are not real (more on that in a moment) and two that gamers never die truly die, they just restart the game – there is always another tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In the magical land of Harry Potter, where seemingly anything can happen, Rowling put in one absolute boundary; death.  Once someone has died, they are dead and no magic can revive them.  This parameter would, from Mark Solms’ perspective, make the books “real” rather than a game.  In a game everything is imaginary – and it is when the real intrudes – when a player in a football game actually dies – that the game quits being a game and becomes reality. 

So, computer games – including first person shooter games, but also games in which virtual worlds are made or a script is followed – are not real because you never die – unless, perhaps, you reach the highest level and solve the problem.  But even then, apparently, you can play the game again to try to do it more efficiently or effectively.  I once had a friend who didn’t like the character that he had constructed in Dungeons and Dragons (a game I have never played), so he set about to kill himself so that he could be assigned a new avatar.  It took him forever to die.

Games, according to Solms, are fun to play precisely because we don’t die.  We play them again and again, but only if we can “win” somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the time – or maybe, if we stretch it, between 30 and 70 per cent of the time.  We find it “fun” when there is a chance that we will win, but also a chance that we will lose.  Computer games capitalize on that by having us do better than we did before – winning, if you will, often.

But they don’t have the same kind of interactional capacities that real life games – the rough and tumble games of wrestling or the interactive games of skill that are played between real people rather than with avatars include figuring out, for instance, how to make the teams fair enough that either can win.  So, the psychoanalytic concern is that children growing up with avatar driven games don’t learn how to interact with people in the real world – they don’t learn how to read when the other has had enough and won’t play anymore unless you let them take the lead role for a while.  They won’t learn the subtleties of relational dynamics (and intrapsychic defenses) that are essential to becoming equipped to play in the very real and rough and tumble world of adulting.

I think this book is also written as a game rather than a novel.  One example of how it imports game architecture into its structure it the way it uses time.  We are constantly going back in time to discover the backstory of the characters. The way this works in gaming is illustrated by the protagonist, Sadie playing a game that she played as a child where she learned that she has to pick up a screwdriver rather than the more satisfying cudgel to bash in the brains of zombies because, she knows, the screwdriver will later be necessary later to fix the elevator.  It is only possible, then, to know in retrospect what we should have done in the game, and it is only in retrospect that we discover in this book what some of the most important elements of the story are.  Psychoanalysts use the term “apres coup” to articulate this sense of wishing to know then what I know now, or only being able to figure out “after the fact” that something is important. 

We, then, are playing a game when Zevin gives us those necessary details in retrospect.  We know that the other central player, Sam, has a broken foot which is a central dynamic in the plot, but we don’t know for a very long time how it was broken nor do we know the full impact on his character of the broken foot until that point and we find ourselves rethinking the role of the foot in Sam's life.  We need to pick up the pieces, carry them along on the journey, but also to assemble them once we have the tools to do that. 

This is both a book about gaming, then, and it is centrally a game about three people that are brought together by games and who end up making games together.  The book is highly structured – it is written as if it were a multi-level game that we, the readers, are playing.  If it were truly a game, the object of the game would be to help the two characters (Sadie and Sam) who are destined to come together accomplish that.  This premise (and the consummate story telling) make it hard to put down - will they get together?  How will they get together? - so I was confused that I was finding it vaguely unsatisfying until I figured out why. 

The author brings us into the book in the same way that a designer brings us into a game, she has us identify with the characters in the story.  To do this, she spells them out in broad strokes – they feel like fantasy figures, rather than real humans.  I want more detail from her, more grit, more character, but I think she is expecting that we, the readers, will bring that to the characters, just as I have noted in other posts that actors bring their lived experience (and their imagination filtered through that lived experience) to the characters that they play and this helps flesh those characters out.  Banquo comes to life because of the felt grief of the actor who plays him, not because the lines, by themselves, lead us to feel sorrow. 

A play or a movie is a collaboration between the writer, the director and the actor (as well as the set designer, the make up artist, the cameraperson, and certainly the other actors) to bring a relatively flat script to life.  This book, despite its length, reads more like a script than like a novel.  The ending feels inevitable from early on and we are invited to figure out how it will be accomplished.  Ultimately, though, the collaboration has to be with the reader, and this reader, while he admired the architecture of the game, and he kept turning the pages with joy, was ultimately not satisfied because the characters were not given the kind of detail that allowed not just the scripted, plot driven ending to occur, but that allowed the psychological ending to hold true.

I went back and looked at my critique of Zevin’s previous book, The storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and the complaint was the same.  The characters weren’t complex there either.  This woman is very good at creating worlds, at building a suspenseful plot, and at putting the players in position.  Weirdly, these characters were interesting.  I cared about them.  But they didn’t end up feeling real.  In particular, Sam, the character who is matched with Sadie and it seems that they are destined to come together is not, I don’t think, ultimately believable.  He is a fantasy character.  Someone whose desire to connect with others, so apparent throughout his life and his pursuit of Sadie, is imagined by this author to be satisfied by becoming her play partner rather than her lover.  And Sadie's remoteness - her comfort with this compromise solution - is not, to me, adequately communicated as a lived component of her character rather than simply being a fact about her.  I don't feel the pain or the conflict or the even just the mistrust that makes her remote.

On some level, I get that a play partner is a better connection than a lover.  As grandparents say about their grandkids, we can play together and then they go home.  The domestic, and all its squabbles, gets separated from the messiness of the real.  Sadie saves Sam early in the book, then Sam saves Sadie. They also deeply disappoint each other.  This is the stuff of real play.  Then, towards the end of the book, Sam saves Sadie again, and he does this by creating a space where they can be together virtually and she can both know and not know that she is interacting with Sam.  He works to rebuild her trust.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we call this progression rupture and repair.  In the virtual space, they marry, something Sadie in a real space is deathly opposed to.  I wrote that last sentence and then deleted it.  Deathly seemed too strong.  But maybe it isn’t.  Maybe for Sadie (And perhaps for Zevin) marriage feels like a death sentence.  Mark Twain wrote that it made no sense to write about the life of a married man because he had no life.  And for women in our culture, many have commented that this has been even more the case.  I can get that on a sociological level, but I read novels to get the particulars of how that plays out for this person.

Sadie remains unknown to me.  This is frustrating.  She is remote - from her early lover who is a cad, from the man at the other end of the triangle and from Sam.  All of that is fine.  But her being remote from the reader - and leaving it to the reader to connect with her remoteness out of her own is, apparently successful - the book is selling very well - but it leaves this reader at a loss.

I’m tempted to take the easy path and say that Zevin’s a grown up a gamer and has learned about life from video games, not from playing games on the playground.  That would, I’m sure, be incredibly reductive.  But I do wonder if she spent more time gaming than reading and playing with friends.  I was also surprised to learn that she has been in a relationship for the last twenty years and that she is has been writing for that long as well.  I had thought that her writing would get more complicated as she matures, but I’m now thinking that she is letting us know that this is her version of a well lived life. It does not surprise me that she is also a very successful writer for a young reader audience. 

I think this book may best be understood as fantasy and a version of an online game and enjoyed as such.  The danger, of course, is that if this book is imitating life, the fears that the analyst's have about gaming feeding the need to play without providing the nourishment that play does may be realized when we turn to entertainment in our books that is as thin as that provided in our consoles.

Postscript:  I have been thinking about this since I posted and I don't think that I articulated the concern about the lack of character.  When Zevin goes back to fill in the backstory on one of the characters, it is frequently to relate an event - often a traumatic event.  This event is supposed, I think, to explain something about the "current" functioning of the character.  It does "explain", in the sense of filling in a back story, but she fails to explain how the incident impacted the character.  

As an example: the character in the first game that Sam and Sadie create is Ichigo.  Ichigo, the lead character, loses his parents when he is preverbal and has to figure out how to fend for himself.  This terrible thing happens - it impacts him - and his development is going to be completely different from every other human, but his avatar is nondescript.  I am referring to him in the masculine, but the avatar has a indiscriminate form.  The characters in the novel are not as nondescript, but they are on that continuum.  We are not just the sum of what happens to us, we are what we have done with what has happened to us, and I want to the author to more clearly articulate how that has occurred in her characters. 

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