Rent: Tomorrow

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.

I rented this book from the library and kept hoping it would get better, but finally I gave up realizing that this book continued to bore me to tears. There was no suspense. It was a Narrator rambling about moments in life and trying to make them all connect. I've read history text books that were more interesting.
If you can't sleep I guarantee this book will put you to sleep.

In his new novel, TOMORROW, Graham Swift has failed to grasp an important truth about the human condition. Either that, or his narrator has. The book is well-written and engaging enough, even if--as nearly every critic I've read has pointed out--it runs out of steam long before the last page. But my problem with it is more fundamental than that.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read TOMORROW yet, stop here. The rest of this review can be accessed by clicking the "Comment" button below.

A middle-aged woman narrates this deeply reflective novel as she lies in bed by her husband one stormy night, restlessly writing a eulogy to her two teenage children about her life and her marriage. It's almost midsummer 1995 and it's a week past Kate and Nick's sixteenth birthday. There's a secret about her family that Paula Hook is propelled to address and the next morning, her husband Mike will also reveal to Nick and Kate his own version of the dramatic denouement that is the climax to their lives so far.

Paula's story begins in 1966, when as a young twenty-year-old she meets the charming and handsome Michael while studying at Sussex University near Brighton. On the cusp of the sexual revolution, college life has become rife with possibilities, the birth control pill has just become available to young women and Brighton is considered to be the best, the coolest, and perhaps the most hip place to be.

The choices that are available to a girl like Paula would have been incomprehensible to her parents, even ten years previously, and the excitement of the new, "the liberated as we sometimes called it," especially attracts Mike. Mike slept around, sleeping with two her friends in possibly quick succession, and then eventually hooking up with Paula. He got into bed with Paula one night in Brighton nearly thirty years ago and though "the place, the room, and even the bed have changed," Mike has managed to stay with her ever since.

Mike's father sent his son twelve bottles of champagne to celebrate their love, the sudden bounty coming to symbolize, in a decidedly impetuous and breathless way, the couple's eventual betrothal even though they didn't actually get married for another four years. Of course, being children of the freewheeling 60's, both Mike and Paula were obliged to scoff at the very idea of marriage.

Paula begins to reveal ever more about her life with Mike as she thinks back to those early days in the seventies where Mike began his research on snails, a supposed stepping stone to his brilliant future in science, and where she began a career as a trainee art dealer at Christie's auction house. And their life together was certainly positive and upwardly mobile, that of a steadily married couple in their thirties living in their terraced house in the picaresque London suburb of Herne Hill.

Bounded at night by her recollections in this darkened bedroom, together with the rain smattering away outside, this world for Paula feels like some sort of temporary refuge. She tells her children of life and how short it is, that they should "seize it, treasure it and cradle it," and also of Mike's father who was forced to fly off to his highly possible death in the 2nd World War, even as Paula's own father cracked codes in the cozy depths of the English countryside, surrounded female clerks, one of which was Paula's mother.

Paula and Mike discover they are cat people when they adopt a cat called Otis, even when he ends up turning their lives upside down in surprising ways. Then along come the announcements and the reckonings, and the understandings about death, especially that of Grandma Pete when Paula cries her heart out at his funeral at Invercullen in Scotland, and also of dear Uncle Edie who died when his was only fifty-seven and who gifted Mike a beautiful, leather-bound Victorian book on mollusks.

Thematically the novel makes a powerful statement, and embedded within the narrative is a plea to live one's life to the fullest, no matter how quick and rushing life may sometimes seem. And ultimately Paula's message to her children is one of love and also of forgiveness. Over the years Paula and Mike have learnt how hard it can be to tell what's true and what's false, what's real and what's pretend as they try to approach the critical question of how to tell their children about this profound decision which ended up altering their lives.

In languid and measured prose, author Graham Swift characterizes a loving and deeply intuitive marriage over the course of thirty years, the author ultimately infusing his tale with a type of worldly melancholy, but one that is also permeated with immense beauty, as well as the possibilities of great happiness. Paula's revelation comes about three quarters into the story, which causes the rest of the novel to become a bit tedious, but Swift's leisurely and competent style, and his astute observations about the nature of life keep the action moving along at a nice enough pace. Copyright Michael Leonard 2007.

I read this for my book club and the person who suggested it called it "the sex book". So that was the first disappointment as there really was little to no sex or sexiness or even love making in it. It was 200+ pages of -- as another reviewer put it -- a self absorbed mother agonizing over something that didn't seem a really big deal -- except of course because she was and had made it a big deal. I guessed the "secret" almost right away so there wasn't even that suspense. I wouldn't bother with it if I were you.

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.

Written as a 255-page middle-of-the night, confessional monologue from a middle-aged mother to her sleeping twin sixteen-year-olds, Graham Swift's TOMORROW is certainly not everyone's cup of literary tea. Swift's latest book is not your basic Lipton brew or Earl Gray. Rather, it's more like a renowned Chinese Bilouchun, elongated spears of baby tea leaves parachuting softly down through the clear water to rest, upright, at the bottom of the glass, dancing gently like a ballerina chorus to the soft movements of the water.

The narrator and sole voice of TOMORROW is Paula (nee Campbell) Hook. Employed by a "good name" London art gallery, Paulie is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her marriage to biologist and snail researched turned science magazine owner and editor Michael Hook. From the book's opening pages, Paula's unspoken dissertation to her twins Kate (the older by bare minutes) and Nick makes clear that a momentous, life-changing announcement from their parents is coming to the teens in the morning. Swift as writer is more than a little coy about the news, alluding to its significance without being specific enough to reveal its precise nature. The reader is left guessing. Could a parent be dying? Are the twins not really brother and sister? Are they adopted, or do they not have the same father?

For the first half to two-thirds of TOMORROW, Swift maintains this cautious dance around the news while retracing the genesis of Paula and Mike's relationship. We learn how they met at Sussex University in southern England (a sort of mannerly ménage a quatre), spent their early adult years together meeting inlaws and leading to marriage, deferring children to establish their respective careers, owning a cat named after Otis Redding, and other bits of mutual background. Interspersed through Paula's monologue are a variety of asides referring to Mike's blissfully sleeping form laying beside his nerve-wracked wife and rhetorical comments and questions addressed mostly to daughter Kate. At times, Paula's retelling of her past with Mike becomes far more explicit than one would expect a mother to relate to her two children, but this is an interior monologue, not a spoken dialogue. Paula is effectively reliving her life with all the explicit details of an adult, including her romantic wanderings. By engaging in a romantic autobiography of which her children will never actually partake, she is free to "speak" adult details and truths that she would never otherwise reveal to her family. Curiously, however, as much as Swift uses time as his measure, his characters exist largely outside of time, insulated and isolated from external events. The Hooks are a family that for sixteen years, from 1979 to 1995, seem to have been entirely unaffected by the era in which they live - politics, movies, technology, music, sports, AIDS, global crises, etc.

Graham Swift's literary conceit in TOMORROW is not necessarily unique or original, but he carries it off to good effect as Paula and Mike's story, and that of their twins, gradually unfolds. Regretably, however, Swift's build-up of the trigger for the next day's momentous news is overplayed, and the news itself comes across as moderately anti-climactic. Nevertheless, he successfully creates a setting in which issues of family and personal identity, only children versus siblings and twins, and family happiness are treated in thought-provoking ways. What does being a mother or father really mean? How much is nature (Mike the biologist/science editor) and how much culture and nurture (Paula the art scholar)? What does a family line mean, and how does our recent ancestry affect our identities as individuals?

TOMORROW moves along at a clock's slow but insistent, middle-of-the-night pace. Still, dawn arrives and life moves forward, hopefully making the best of what is given to hand. The story is not flashy or pyrotechnic (despite the ridiculous blurb to that effect on the dust jacket), but it will give pause to adult readers with families and children. Like a truly refined blend of tea, TOMORROW leaves a low-key, pleasing sense of satisfaction as it goes gently down.

We find Paula Hook, fifty year old wife of Mike, lying awake trying to anticipate the scene tomorrow where something from the past, of life-altering significance, must be revealed to her twin sixteen year old teenagers. It is that revelation that is to occur on a particular day in June, 1995, that provides the tension for the book. But why now; why not before or never?

The book consists of Paula's wide-ranging examination of her life and Mike's from their time of meeting at Sussex University in Brighton some thirty years ago to their present middle-class existence including interactions with both sets of parents. It is Paula's keen eye for the subtleties and developments of life that makes for an interesting read. However, as her and Mike's journey is revealed, the reader gets a strong sense that neither of them could have been involved in any affair that should invoke the sense of dread that Paula seems to feel. In fact, Paula comes to understnad that perhaps people may have more knowledge of the unspoken than first thought.

I kept waiting and reading and reading and waiting for some significant issue to be revealed. Big revelations have to be a bit more significant than the one here. Self-absorbed mom tells all! Where's the beef?

(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

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.

Written as a 255-page middle-of-the night, confessional monologue from a middle-aged mother to her sleeping twin sixteen-year-olds, Graham Swift's TOMORROW is certainly not everyone's cup of literary tea. Swift's latest book is not your basic Lipton brew or Earl Gray. Rather, it's more like a renowned Chinese Bilouchun, elongated spears of baby tea leaves parachuting softly down through the clear water to rest, upright, at the bottom of the glass, dancing gently like a ballerina chorus to the soft movements of the water.

The narrator and sole voice of TOMORROW is Paula (nee Campbell) Hook. Employed by a "good name" London art gallery, Paulie is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her marriage to biologist and snail researched turned science magazine owner and editor Michael Hook. From the book's opening pages, Paula's unspoken dissertation to her twins Kate (the older by bare minutes) and Nick makes clear that a momentous, life-changing announcement from their parents is coming to the teens in the morning. Swift as writer is more than a little coy about the news, alluding to its significance without being specific enough to reveal its precise nature. The reader is left guessing. Could a parent be dying? Are the twins not really brother and sister? Are they adopted, or do they not have the same father?

For the first half to two-thirds of TOMORROW, Swift maintains this cautious dance around the news while retracing the genesis of Paula and Mike's relationship. We learn how they met at Sussex University in southern England (a sort of mannerly ménage a quatre), spent their early adult years together meeting inlaws and leading to marriage, deferring children to establish their respective careers, owning a cat named after Otis Redding, and other bits of mutual background. Interspersed through Paula's monologue are a variety of asides referring to Mike's blissfully sleeping form laying beside his nerve-wracked wife and rhetorical comments and questions addressed mostly to daughter Kate. At times, Paula's retelling of her past with Mike becomes far more explicit than one would expect a mother to relate to her two children, but this is an interior monologue, not a spoken dialogue. Paula is effectively reliving her life with all the explicit details of an adult, including her romantic wanderings. By engaging in a romantic autobiography of which her children will never actually partake, she is free to "speak" adult details and truths that she would never otherwise reveal to her family. Curiously, however, as much as Swift uses time as his measure, his characters exist largely outside of time, insulated and isolated from external events. The Hooks are a family that for sixteen years, from 1979 to 1995, seem to have been entirely unaffected by the era in which they live - politics, movies, technology, music, sports, AIDS, global crises, etc.

Graham Swift's literary conceit in TOMORROW is not necessarily unique or original, but he carries it off to good effect as Paula and Mike's story, and that of their twins, gradually unfolds. Regretably, however, Swift's build-up of the trigger for the next day's momentous news is overplayed, and the news itself comes across as moderately anti-climactic. Nevertheless, he successfully creates a setting in which issues of family and personal identity, only children versus siblings and twins, and family happiness are treated in thought-provoking ways. What does being a mother or father really mean? How much is nature (Mike the biologist/science editor) and how much culture and nurture (Paula the art scholar)? What does a family line mean, and how does our recent ancestry affect our identities as individuals?

TOMORROW moves along at a clock's slow but insistent, middle-of-the-night pace. Still, dawn arrives and life moves forward, hopefully making the best of what is given to hand. The story is not flashy or pyrotechnic (despite the ridiculous blurb to that effect on the dust jacket), but it will give pause to adult readers with families and children. Like a truly refined blend of tea, TOMORROW leaves a low-key, pleasing sense of satisfaction as it goes gently down.

We find Paula Hook, fifty year old wife of Mike, lying awake trying to anticipate the scene tomorrow where something from the past, of life-altering significance, must be revealed to her twin sixteen year old teenagers. It is that revelation that is to occur on a particular day in June, 1995, that provides the tension for the book. But why now; why not before or never?

The book consists of Paula's wide-ranging examination of her life and Mike's from their time of meeting at Sussex University in Brighton some thirty years ago to their present middle-class existence including interactions with both sets of parents. It is Paula's keen eye for the subtleties and developments of life that makes for an interesting read. However, as her and Mike's journey is revealed, the reader gets a strong sense that neither of them could have been involved in any affair that should invoke the sense of dread that Paula seems to feel. In fact, Paula comes to understnad that perhaps people may have more knowledge of the unspoken than first thought.

I kept waiting and reading and reading and waiting for some significant issue to be revealed. Big revelations have to be a bit more significant than the one here. Self-absorbed mom tells all! Where's the beef?

(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

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.

Written as a 255-page middle-of-the night, confessional monologue from a middle-aged mother to her sleeping twin sixteen-year-olds, Graham Swift's TOMORROW is certainly not everyone's cup of literary tea. Swift's latest book is not your basic Lipton brew or Earl Gray. Rather, it's more like a renowned Chinese Bilouchun, elongated spears of baby tea leaves parachuting softly down through the clear water to rest, upright, at the bottom of the glass, dancing gently like a ballerina chorus to the soft movements of the water.

The narrator and sole voice of TOMORROW is Paula (nee Campbell) Hook. Employed by a "good name" London art gallery, Paulie is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her marriage to biologist and snail researched turned science magazine owner and editor Michael Hook. From the book's opening pages, Paula's unspoken dissertation to her twins Kate (the older by bare minutes) and Nick makes clear that a momentous, life-changing announcement from their parents is coming to the teens in the morning. Swift as writer is more than a little coy about the news, alluding to its significance without being specific enough to reveal its precise nature. The reader is left guessing. Could a parent be dying? Are the twins not really brother and sister? Are they adopted, or do they not have the same father?

For the first half to two-thirds of TOMORROW, Swift maintains this cautious dance around the news while retracing the genesis of Paula and Mike's relationship. We learn how they met at Sussex University in southern England (a sort of mannerly ménage a quatre), spent their early adult years together meeting inlaws and leading to marriage, deferring children to establish their respective careers, owning a cat named after Otis Redding, and other bits of mutual background. Interspersed through Paula's monologue are a variety of asides referring to Mike's blissfully sleeping form laying beside his nerve-wracked wife and rhetorical comments and questions addressed mostly to daughter Kate. At times, Paula's retelling of her past with Mike becomes far more explicit than one would expect a mother to relate to her two children, but this is an interior monologue, not a spoken dialogue. Paula is effectively reliving her life with all the explicit details of an adult, including her romantic wanderings. By engaging in a romantic autobiography of which her children will never actually partake, she is free to "speak" adult details and truths that she would never otherwise reveal to her family. Curiously, however, as much as Swift uses time as his measure, his characters exist largely outside of time, insulated and isolated from external events. The Hooks are a family that for sixteen years, from 1979 to 1995, seem to have been entirely unaffected by the era in which they live - politics, movies, technology, music, sports, AIDS, global crises, etc.

Graham Swift's literary conceit in TOMORROW is not necessarily unique or original, but he carries it off to good effect as Paula and Mike's story, and that of their twins, gradually unfolds. Regretably, however, Swift's build-up of the trigger for the next day's momentous news is overplayed, and the news itself comes across as moderately anti-climactic. Nevertheless, he successfully creates a setting in which issues of family and personal identity, only children versus siblings and twins, and family happiness are treated in thought-provoking ways. What does being a mother or father really mean? How much is nature (Mike the biologist/science editor) and how much culture and nurture (Paula the art scholar)? What does a family line mean, and how does our recent ancestry affect our identities as individuals?

TOMORROW moves along at a clock's slow but insistent, middle-of-the-night pace. Still, dawn arrives and life moves forward, hopefully making the best of what is given to hand. The story is not flashy or pyrotechnic (despite the ridiculous blurb to that effect on the dust jacket), but it will give pause to adult readers with families and children. Like a truly refined blend of tea, TOMORROW leaves a low-key, pleasing sense of satisfaction as it goes gently down.

We find Paula Hook, fifty year old wife of Mike, lying awake trying to anticipate the scene tomorrow where something from the past, of life-altering significance, must be revealed to her twin sixteen year old teenagers. It is that revelation that is to occur on a particular day in June, 1995, that provides the tension for the book. But why now; why not before or never?

The book consists of Paula's wide-ranging examination of her life and Mike's from their time of meeting at Sussex University in Brighton some thirty years ago to their present middle-class existence including interactions with both sets of parents. It is Paula's keen eye for the subtleties and developments of life that makes for an interesting read. However, as her and Mike's journey is revealed, the reader gets a strong sense that neither of them could have been involved in any affair that should invoke the sense of dread that Paula seems to feel. In fact, Paula comes to understnad that perhaps people may have more knowledge of the unspoken than first thought.

I kept waiting and reading and reading and waiting for some significant issue to be revealed. Big revelations have to be a bit more significant than the one here. Self-absorbed mom tells all! Where's the beef?

(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