Picking through the debris
A review of Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers
The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda. Out May 6, 2025. Preorder here. Mild spoilers below.
If the 2010s were a ship that’s been smashed to bits, Matthew Gasda pilots a dinghy through the wreckage, waving an arm across the drowning and the dead, saying, Look! Look at these idiots. None of these people knew how to live. We would like to take him for his word, and perhaps hitch a ride to somewhere more pleasant — for we were aboard that old order of things, and it is our bodies and flotsam that bob around in the dirty wash. But Gasda lingers and contemplates the misery of the millennial. Do we thank him for it? Hard to say.
Gasda is a playwright, best known for Dimes Square, a play in which whoever happens to be hanging around lower Manhattan does ketamine and declares the near-post-COVID years to be “the dumbest time in human history.” It was hailed by the NYT as an underground hit. His first novel, The Sleepers, again takes place in Manhattan but this time generously extends to include Brooklyn, and relates the fates of leftist academics, bisexual filmmakers, washed-up actors, and college students. The plot isn’t of great concern, and all the characters are wretched.
I am famously antipathetic to New Gork City and could not have written a more unflattering portrayal: “The city was a debris field; people were the debris: strange, lost, broken, wandering things.” (128) His characters are victims of their own poor decisions. These people don’t know how to swim in the stuff of life, they can’t enjoy a sunny day in McCarren Park. Dan and Mariko, a couple who live together but can’t commit to marriage, cheat on each other. Both are aware of the other’s actions, but too consumed by their own infidelity to care — they are endlessly more interested in the fact they have cheated than they are upset at their partner’s unfaithfulness. The act of infidelity sparks a personal crisis, which, in our therapeutic age, is a deeply significant event, with rich potential for meaning-making in a world when personality is all that’s left, and yours isn’t cutting it anymore.
As the hand flinches from a hot stove, registering pain before the mind, so The Sleepers shows the body politic wrenching undone before the participants register the shock. The novel is an indictment of the 2010s, with new technologies creating new and (presumably) worse social structures1. Philip Rieff described “our present temporarily schizoid existence in two cultures — vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom.” Temporarily (!) schizoid. Poor Rieff. He wrote that sixty years ago. Gasda shows we’re still self-obsessed and disjointed in time, beating dead purposes, inventing deadlier devices.
Our deadliest device, and Gasda’s most persistent motif, is the smartphone, perfected in the 2010s, which through pornography, dating apps, and the endless scroll, proves a major impediment to normal human functioning. Some critics think that no good art can be set in the present, because iPhones are too ugly to render on the page or screen. Gasda, to his immense credit, has no problems rendering the ugly on page. He is the first writer I’ve read that feels genuinely comfortable in a digital setting. He flits easily between text speak, dialogue, and aphoristic quips: She wanted to believe that relationships were about compatibility, about two people who just got each other, but there was no evidence that there was anyone who got her, and that there was anyone she got. The only evidence was for struggle, trench warfare, incremental gains of understanding and sympathy. (78-79)
At times, Gasda could benefit from a little discipline. The Sleepers is not a long book, and “gnomically” is used as an adverb three different times. I don’t say this to be pedantic, but because I’ve never seen “gnomically” used as an adverb even once before and I would like to see what else Gasda’s got up his sleeve. I came away most impressed with his ear for flirting, which is famously tricky to depict, because it’s not even really about language at all, but boils down to two people going “Oh yeah?” “Oh yeah?” Until they have sex.
Perhaps this is what makes Gasda a good playwright and an uncertain novelist. He has brought his tools from the theater. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue (the pitter-patter, the give-and-take, even if the dialect is cringey it is true), and consequently there is an enormous amount of dialogue. The Sleepers reads like a play, and would take almost no effort to stage. But as a novel, it’s uneven, loosely constructed. This makes it fun to read. Certainly it sings with more life than any “taut” and “deeply urgent” MFA spawn from recent memory. As to Gasda’s broader message, there are gestures toward loosening our grip on life, making art, and having children. A regime I largely support. But the novel goes by too fast, and we finish the book feeling that Gasda hasn’t fully plumbed the depths of the problems that absorb him. Not yet. But he is prolific, and we trust he will keep plumbing.
Perhaps the worst thing about The Sleepers is that it’s set in New Gork City. I am suspicious of all novels set in New Gork, because I can never quite shake the feeling that perhaps the character’s problems are not inevitable or terminal, but caused by New Gork itself. The solipsism of “New York or nowhere” gets tiring, and at no point in the novel do any of the city’s inhabitants consider leaving. In fact one character seemingly kills themself rather than start over somewhere new, which feels a bit extreme when Sausalito exists.
Is everyone in New Gork City so miserable? Is Gasda so unfeeling? No. Two characters are shown to have a healthy disposition: a theater director dying of cancer, and a visitor, heading to the airport to leave New Gork: “At this point, she’s just ready for Akari to wake up, to call a car, and to get out of here; she can’t help but feel that it’s dangerous to absorb too much more of this.” (271). I know the feeling. Amen.
I do wonder if Gasda hasn’t gotten it wrong. If we experience the rise of totalizing technologies in the 2020s, we may come to think back on the 2010s as a sort of idyllic pre-nuclear era, a harmless decade. Granted nothing good happened, but nothing irreversibly terrible, either. It’s brave to set a book so consciously in the 2010s at all. Who wants to relitigate Trump vs. Clinton. It’s too close, too raw. Sure, we’re willing to reappraise the inhabitants of the 1970s, but ourselves eight years ago? It feels better to avert one’s eyes.
The theater director has a healthy disposition? I’ll pray for you.
Wonderful work.