Tomorrow (Hardcover)

by Graham Swift (Author)
Key Phrases: mrs lambert, Grandpa Pete, Grannie Helen, Uncle Eddie (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This splendid novel by Booker Prize–winner Smith (for Last Orders) has its roots in the 1960s sexual awakening and takes place over the course of a sleepless night in June 1995. Paula Campbell Hook lies awake beside her sleeping husband, Mike, and worries about the shocking revelation that she and Mike will make to their 16-year-old twins tomorrow. Paula recalls her meeting with Mike at university in 1966, when sex was free and easy (a glut of it), the immediate consummation of their sexual passion, their marriage and successful careers, and the birth of the twins after almost a decade together. Mainly, Swift explores the ways in which secrets are created to ensure happiness, and the potential for emotional damage when the truth is revealed. Swift has channeled the tenderness in Paula's voice with uncanny exactitude, granting her a mother's sentimental observations about pregnancy and raising children. He drops a few clever red herrings, so the narrative retains the vibrato of suspense until the secret is revealed. But the novel's remaining pages, which convey the exaggerated doomsday fears of middle-of-the night wakefulness, seem padded. In essence, this moving exploration of marriage and parenthood is a ringing affirmation of modern life. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker
Throughout his career, Swift has made good use of stories that unfold backward, working toward revelations about the past. But the strategy misfires badly in this novel, narrated by a woman lying awake next to her sleeping husband and mentally talking to her sixteen-year-old twins about a secret whose revelation, the next day, will change their lives. The problem is partly that the secret turns out to be unmomentous, but also that it is used as a device to lead us through the history of a marriage—student love in the sixties, career choices, deaths of a cat and a parent—that has little narrative impetus of its own. Presumably, Swift is trying to celebrate ordinariness, but he seems to have been unsure how to do it.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House Canada (September 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030735590X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307355904
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I'm the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all our lives.", September 22, 2007

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Tomorrow (Hardcover)

(3.5 stars) It is 1995, and Paula Campbell Hook is lying awake in bed on the eve of a dramatic announcement which she and her husband Mike will make to their sixteen-year-old twins. They have delayed this life-changing occasion for several years, having decided to wait until after the twins, Nick and Kate, have celebrated their sixteenth birthday, fearful that they might be "wrenching [them] forever from [their] childhood." In the course of the night, Paula reminisces about her past, her thirty-year relationship with Mike, her wedding, the marriages of their parents and their parents' histories, the deaths of family members, the childhoods of the twins, and the concept of love across three generations.

Throughout the novel, Paula contrasts her present life and that of the twins with the lives of her parents and Mike's parents, showing how each person's expectations for the future grow out of his/her upbringing, relationships with those who love them, and the historical period in which s/he happens to live. Paula's meditations are conversational and very intimate, sometimes revolving around the sexual freedom she and Mike experienced, separately and together, in the sixties. While her personal confessions may be more than she ever actually plans to discuss with the twins (and it is certainly more than the twins need to know), they do add to the developing themes for the reader, preparing him/her for the announcement which is the crux of the novel.

Swift deliberately ignores two of the canons of fiction writing in order to relate Paula's story. First of all, he writes (surprisingly effectively) as a woman--sharing all a woman's intimacies, points of view, and attitudes. Because the entire novel is an interior monologue, however, he ends up telling about the action, instead of recreating it in lively scenes. This almost works, since Paula is a character who reveals every thought, every emotion, and every aspect of her life to the reader, no matter how personal, but this also makes some of her monologue feel unnatural and the "telling about" of the events somewhat tedious.

The reader discovers the nature of the dramatic announcement with one hundred pages left in the novel, and while it may be difficult for the family to deal with, it is not a unique situation, nor is it something that will necessarily change life for the family as much as Paula thinks it will. As a result, the remainder of the novel feels anticlimactic, and it ends as it begins, with Paula still the only one awake. Graham Swift takes a lot of chances with structure in this novel, and he almost succeeds. The novel has many fine qualities, but its revelations ultimately seem contrived, instead of inevitable. n Mary Whipple

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars dripping with sentimentality, July 4, 2008

By	Eric Margelefsky (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tomorrow (Hardcover)

First let me say that I only finished this book because I was listening to it on CD and was on a long car ride with nothing else to listen to. Otherwise I would have abandoned it after chapter 2.

The first half of this book contains two things: first, hype about some secret announcement that will be made "tomorrow" and that will change everyone's lives and that nothing will be the same again and just you wait until tomorrow, oh boy! Second, is a very long and very detailed memoir-style retelling of the narrator's meeting and falling in love with her husband; her father's falling in love with her mother; her husband's father falling in love with her father's mother; there is even an entire chapter about her husband's father's brother. It goes on and on, all interspersed with the narrator's mawkish fawning over her two children, which gets so repetitive and syrupy that you just know the kids would have walked away before the end of the story.

Oh, and there are funerals. If you like descriptions of funerals, you're in for a treat.

The second half of this book is just one big huge let-down after the hype built up in the first. The actual announcement left me wondering what the big deal was. And there are still many anticlimactic pages left after it is made.

This book is cringeworthy not only for its dripping sentimentality, but also for the detailed description of the narrator's sex life as she drones to her two 16-year-old children. No child wants to know how skilled his father is in bed, or what position her parents were in during some particularly passionate session of lovemaking. At times the author seems to recognize this and has the narrator say things like, "I know you don't want to know this about your mother, but..." and "cover your ears because this is really gonna be gross..." which does nothing to make the following discussion any more believable.

In short, don't start reading this book. It has little to offer besides sentimentality about love and death, two topics which are not nearly as novel as the author seems to thingk. And once you get that dose of hype and start wondering about the mysterious revelation to come "tomorrow," you're going to be let down, big time. And from all of the excessive sentimentality, you'll still be cringing--tomorrow.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Yikes, even I couldn't finish this book, July 24, 2008

By	Faith "Mom of 2" (Boston-ish) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomorrow (Hardcover)

I'm the person who sits to the very end of even horrible movies, hoping it will redeem itself in the end. I can't remember the last book I began and didn't finish. I came to Amazon this morning after getting halfway through this book to see if it was "just me". Glad to see others found it equally tedious. The "big secret" is really annoying, and fairly easy to "guess". The tedium of the writing put me to sleep and kept me checking ahead to see if it ever got better as the book went on, it appears not to. Alas...I have given up!