Customer Reviews

Tomorrow

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

(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

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!

I was very relieved when I looked up this book on Amazon and saw the lukewarm reviews -- I thought, "So I wasn't wrong! This IS pretty pathetic." I've read other works by Graham Swift that I enjoyed, but this was a big dud. It is grotesquely overwritten, and the storyline feels completely flat, despite all the dramatic proclamations of the narrator (at least two or three per chapter) that tomorrow will change their lives. I actually disliked the narrator a lot despite -- or rather because of -- her gushing love for her children and husband. She comes across as having almost no nuances, no depth, nothing to complicate the fact that in all ways she acted in the best interest of her family. Swift seems to want us to forgive her completely for what she did (perhaps to allow the reader to imagine that her children will too), and that strikes me as a pointless thing to do in a novel. If these people have no real problems, why should I read about them? They have nothing in common with anyone I know.

[Spoiler alert] One example of what I mean about the narrator: she tells us about the affair she had with the vet in such a way as to leave no doubt that it meant nothing to her and she really, really, really still loves her husband and children and never meant them any harm. That seems absurd. Sorry, but I'd be much more interested to discover a little trace of selfishness in her, because as is she barely seems human. Moreover, weirdly enough, her endless sense of self-sacrifice actually ends up making her seem shallow, as though she's incapable of any other emotions.

Also, while Swift seems to be trying to say "Look at me, I can write convincingly from a female perspective!" I don't think he does. An early example: after Paula and Mike first make love, the next day they go on a picnic with her two roommates -- one of whom has slept with Mike and the other of whom may have done so. And they all have a great time! I almost started laughing when I read this, thinking this must be one of the great male fantasies of all time: three women you've been with all going out together with you and all getting along happily together, nobody jealous or hurt or angry. Yeah, right, Graham!

For a better, far more realistic (and admittedly grim) male-writer-does-female-perspective, try Roddy Doyle's "The Woman Who Walked into Doors," about another Paula, but a far more interesting, three-dimensional one.

What a total bore. At first, there's suspense, as you wonder what the heck this mother is dreading the next day. I expected something big and grand. I won't tell you what it is, but let me just say that "the revelation" is incredibly disappointing. What a snooze. This would have probably been a powerful short story. But 255 pages of this rambling is too much.

I am a big Graham Swift fan but I found this novel a bit disappointing. While his writing maintains his previous strength the underlying story is just not that compelling. The big secret turns out to be fairly mundane and to a certain degree not worth the effort. I will await his next offering but will be sure to read more reviews before ordering.

This novel consists of a woman (Paula Hook) lying awake in bed next to her sleeping husband, thinking about a revelation they plan to make to their 16-year-old twins the following day. The reader is made aware of the secret well before the end but is supposed to read on, perhaps expecting more but not getting it. The revelation does not live up to its billing in Paula's thoughts, though it's for some reason embellished with endless reflections on relatives, pets, houses, work lives, and brief affairs. The "great secret" has little or no connection to most of these ruminations, so it basically becomes an excuse for Paula's remaining awake, enabling her to bore us with the mundane details of her life. I would only recommend this book to those who are in Paula's position, that is, lying awake in bed needing something to put them to sleep.

Graham Swift has developed an idiosyncratic format which he has demonstrated in other books far more compelling than this one. While there are flashes of interest, the plot point driving the suspense is not particularly devastating. Swift uses introspection and memory, sometimes faulty, to create the story. I'm usually a huge fan of his work, but can't recommend this one as much.

Someone should have told Graham Swift that a man can't achieve a visceral understanding of the bond between mother and child before he decided to write an entire novel in the first person about that bond. It missed the mark completely.

Does a reader owe anything to the writer? I think so, and that is why I waited for pages and pages and pages before deciding -- O phooey -- GET TO THE POINT! And I looked ahead. Swift is a respectable writer and the writing in Tomorrow is good, really, and it's sensitive, and some of us of a certain rather advanced age can relate to the 60s culture, contemplation of our parents' marriages, our career choices, the love and loss of cats -- but gee. What keeps a reader reading? Conflict that has some hope of being advanced and resolved in an expected number of pages, that's what.

There was such a buildup to the awful life-changing secret that was going to be revealed -- I was expecting incest or murder at the very least -- having given up on the spy angle -- that there was inevitable letdown.

For those that like sensitive, contemplative writing and who have no problems with impatience, this may be just the slow meander through the past fifty years that will resonate for you. Likewise for those passionate couples who have had infertility problems and who have come to over-cherish their cats [if it is possible to over-cherish a cat]. But for those with ordinary, middlebrow, expectations of the novel -- entertainment, primarily, however expressed, but hastening to its certain denouement, this will have you twitching, and maybe deciding that this is one novel you can abandon, or skim, with a clear conscience.