Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow v. Dinosaurs
The 2023 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 14 • OPENING ROUND
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
v. Dinosaurs
Judged by Olivia Waite
Olivia Waite (she/her) writes queer historical romance, fantasy, science fiction, and essays. She is the romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I’ve already read Babel (devastating) and have posted about it a couple of times on Mastodon.” / oliviawaite.com
Editor’s note: Today’s judgment contains spoilers for people who haven’t finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. We’ve cloaked the relevant text below.
Humans are terrible at minding our own business. If there’s something we can see, we’ll stare; if we stare long enough, we’ll want to touch; if we touch something, we’ll end up having feelings about it; if we feel for something, we’ll end up meddling with it, because by then it’s ours.
The classic example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where Jimmy Stewart in a New York apartment copes with a broken leg by obsessing over his neighbors’ love lives/murders. Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs reverses this: Protagonist Gil leaves his Manhattan apartment using only his legs, walking hundreds of miles to a new home in Phoenix.
Hitchcock’s aura of surveillance remains, though: Gil’s new neighbors live in a voyeurism-ready, glass-walled house. The more Gil watches, the more his life becomes entangled with theirs: he becomes a surrogate parent figure to kids Tom and Clem, and a sounding board for parents Ardis and Ted. They throw parties that invite guests into both the glass house and Gil’s “castle” next door.
Novelists love the broken glass of a car crash almost as much as they love a dog barking somewhere in the night.
At one party, Gil lets Clem take her friends into the castle basement, which is full of vintage pinball machines. A moment very like this is where Gabrielle Zevin begins Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: two lonely kids in a hospital, playing a video game. Sam is recovering from the car accident that killed his mother and destroyed his foot. Sadie is at loose ends while her sister receives cancer treatment. The games give Sam and Sadie a space for a fraught friendship, and years later they reunite to build games together.
If the Dinosaurs is Rear Window, the Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: a decades-spanning accumulation of grudges and grace. Both books center human connection via glass. Dinosaurs is about what happens when the barriers between you and the people you’re watching disappear. Tomorrow is about two people staring into the same screen. A window versus a mirror.
You wouldn’t think the window book would have sharper edges. Some of that is the spareness of Millet’s prose, which is honed to a sleekness—but the book goes a long way to isolate its lead character from the jump. Gil has family money but no living family, and few friends. He’s deeply shaken when the full violent truth of his parents’ death is imposed on him; novelists love the broken glass of a car crash almost as much as they love a dog barking somewhere in the night.
They also apparently love killing my favorite secondary characters—and these scenes were the key that unlocked the difference between these novels.
The loss of Van Alsten, Gil’s oldest friend, is the second most beautiful passage in Dinosaurs, and it gives Gil the impetus to forge new connections and to investigate who is killing the birds in the desert behind his house. Ultimately this leads to a moment that shatters Gil’s separateness, and in the shards (and with the help of pain and Vicodin) he is granted a kaleidoscopic vision of life’s continuity: “a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.” This is the most beautiful passage in the book, and I greatly admired it.
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And then I picked up Tomorrow and reached the chapter titled “The NPC,” and it was my turn to be shattered.
Marx is Sam’s college roommate, the game company’s producer, and eventually Sadie’s lover. He’s effusive, charismatic, and I adored him. Like Van Alsten, Marx sacrifices his life to save someone else’s. Unlike Van Alsten, we see this from the inside, as Marx as a bird is shot while trying to steal a strawberry: “You feel the bullet penetrate your hollow bird bones.”
The immediacy is gutting, and we and Marx fumble to understand: Am I dying? Are we in a video game? It’s bold and gorgeous, and I will never be over it. I’ve lost enough loved ones to recognize the sick pang of real grief even when it’s fiction doing it to me.
This chapter is the only time Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow uses those close-to-the-bone, second-person pronouns, but not the only time it slips into a side character’s thoughts to embellish the emotional landscape. It’s a chorus of voices that feels generous, expansive, and empathetic. Everyone has a perspective—everyone is feeling, all the time, in Tomorrow. And the reader’s given enough of it that when characters fight—as Sam and Sadie do, with Gothic intensity—we get that immersive rush of being both the one who lashes out and the one who feels the bruise.
Unfortunately this means we’re left with the fewest answers just when the questions are most interesting.
Looking back at Dinosaurs now, it feels almost perverse how the story pivots to keep disaster at one remove from the lead for most of the novel. Gil’s girlfriend left him in an utterly ordinary breakup (unlike Sadie’s frighteningly abusive affair with her professor). He grieves his parents, but he wasn’t in the car for the accident (as Sam was). He contemplates death in Van Alsten’s hospital room, faces violence when he finds the bodies of birds, but he doesn’t experience it (as Marx-the-human/Marx-the-bird does). Dinosaurs keeps its lead behind glass until that stunning final chapter opens him up.
And then—it abandons him there. Abandons us, really, as though now that its climax has been reached, the novel is avoiding eye contact as it buttons its shirt and calls for a cab. In trying to sidestep the vulgarity of an unearned or simplistic catharsis, Dinosaurs chooses to avoid the final catharsis altogether. Unfortunately this means we’re left with the fewest answers just when the questions are most interesting.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ends its odyssey where we began, with Sam and Sadie and a video game. It’s an elegant reset, and there’s always the hope that this time around, they’ll play it better.
So my judgment favors Tomorrow—because it is brave enough to wear its heart on its sleeve. Dinosaurs is a very fine novel, but Tomorrow has warmth and courage.
Advancing:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: When we were discussing Mercury Pictures Presents the other day, we mentioned that you don’t always have a good reason why you like or don’t like a novel. Often, the connection is just either there or it’s not. But if I didn’t like Dinosaurs, I think I know what justification I might give to an English professor.
Dinosaurs is a novel almost entirely without conflict. In Judge Waite’s words, "the book goes a long way to isolate its lead character." This isn’t to say it’s a novel without incident. A lot happens. In the first three pages, for instance, Gil walks across the United States. But that walk occurs mostly off-page, and he has almost no stories to tell about the journey. He was never attacked by a mountain lion, or shivved by a hungry drifter over a wild onion. If I walked across the country, John, I’d have some tales to tell. Lots of other stuff happens after Gil gets to Arizona, but that stuff is often "picking up the neighbor kid from karate class" and so forth. Not exactly the kinds of derring-do that would have made it into The Count of Monte Cristo. But that said, I enjoyed the hell out of this book, which is all to the credit of Lydia Millet, who is a wonderful writer. I love every minute I get to spend with her prose.
Maybe it was also the right book for me at the right time. With war in Ukraine, and Florida turning into some sort of fascist state for angry super-weirdos, and both of my kids driving now, maybe I want to read a book about a guy who has just enough money he doesn’t have to worry about it, and maybe I’m able to sit and enjoy nothing very bad ever happening to him. Maybe I don’t need the agita.
John Warner: There may not be a ton of conflict in Dinosaurs, but I think there are many moments of very satisfying tension. There is a neighbor in the subdivision we know to be trouble, and we wonder if there is a ticking time bomb ready to go off. There’s also an incident at that dojo that seeds some potential worries and there are for sure tensions between Gil and Ted and Gil and Ardis, as Gil learns things about each of them.
I think the reason it seems like there isn’t much conflict is because Millet purposefully decides to pay off these tensions in ways that don’t necessarily relate to plot, but are much more part of the thematic landscape she’s exploring. I found those choices fascinating, and because of them, the book is wholly involving.
Kevin: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was one of my favorite reads from this year. It’s expertly constructed and readable, but also touching. I’m a little older than the characters, but I lived adjacent to that world and there are so many familiar moments for me in this novel. It has great insight into creative people. There’s a short dialogue, for instance, about how failure is necessary to creativity, but also what it feels like to fail in public. Any writer will feel that passage deep in their gut. I don’t know that I can pick a sentence from the novel and dazzle you with it (in the way I could, for instance, with The Rabbit Hutch), but each sentence is like a line of code written by its characters animating a world that is great fun to be inside. In many ways I think writing a book that is this much fun for others to read is more difficult than being clever.
John: I really appreciated how Judge Waite braided these stories together in the judgment because that braiding together ultimately shows how different they are. T and T and T is determined to get you to care deeply about the characters, combining that quality with a sense of nostalgia firmly grooved to people between the ages of 25 and 55, and you have a book that’s going to tickle the pleasure centers.
When tragedy befalls, the reader feels it with a force that binds them to the book. It is very, very effective. It is the book from last year that I’ve heard more people say that others have to read.
I think that tie to the characters papers over some things that I thought were convenient to the storytelling and some passages of writing that were not up to the quality of the best the book has to offer, the kinds of things that I would talk about if I were a critic charged with evaluating the "quality" of the book. But as I said in that matchup between Mercury Pictures Presents and The Book of Goose, there’s a reason why I’m not a critic.
Kevin: I’ll admit there is something manipulative about T3. Sam is a character you could build by prompting a chatbot with "a smart kid in the style of John Irving." He has vulnerabilities (and a backstory) that play on your sympathies even as he acts like a dick throughout much of the novel. Marx basically has no flaws, which makes his story arc almost Christ-like (check that Irving box again). Just by Sadie being a female coder in an overwhelmingly male industry, you cheer for her, even if the treatment of her character seems a little soft in the wake of real-life GamerGate. Of course, being crueler to Sadie would probably put Zevin crosswise with a lot of readers.
There is a chapter in this novel that takes place entirely inside basically a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In other words, the characters in that chapter are characters in a video game being manipulated by characters in the novel (who in turn are being manipulated by Zevin). Very little in this chapter makes sense in the real world. Even logistics for the characters playing the game don’t really add up. It underscored for me that these characters (and the characters played by the characters) are all several dimensions removed from reality. I didn’t care that the story’s logic wasn’t always locked down tight. Artists and writers are telling some of the most compelling stories in the media of video games right now, and they are entirely about controlling the experience of the user. You can consent to being manipulated, and I was all in for it.
John: All narrative is going to manipulate the reader in one way or another, of course, but you’ve helped me put my finger on some things that nagged at me as I read T and T and T, that the characters are kept perfectly safe in some ways while being imperiled in others that really ratchet up the old pathos.
Again, this is not a flaw, but a choice. For me, Millet kept suggesting that it was possible for Gil’s rebuilt life to crumble to pieces, but it’s actually a novel about it coming together. Up until the very end, I was not certain this was the case. With T and T and T, you sort of know that shit is going to go down, but it’s going to resolve in the way we’re hoping for Sam and Sadie. The specifics of that resolution may be in doubt, but the general contours are apparent throughout.
Kevin: We are halfway through the opening round. You and I will be back here tomorrow, as 2015 Rooster winner Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility takes on R. F. Kuang’s Babel.
Today’s mascot
Say hello to today’s mascot, Nibbles! Nibbles, brought to us by ToB reader Matt E., is a hairless rescue Guinea Pig, three years old. “She only just recently grew into her feet (they were practically flippers),” Matt says. “She is super sweet, but a total sucker. She falls for every prank.” For example, you ask Nibbles what her favorite book is, and she says, “The Good Book!” You’re a little surprised, you didn’t know she was religious. Then she pauses, as if in deep thought. After a minute, she says, “What’s a book?” Welcome, Nibbles!
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