Gasda's "The Sleepers" Works Its Charm Over Time

Matthew Gasda's debut novel is a great reading experience, but also frustrating, and even that frustration is constructive grounds for conversation.

The first chapter of Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers is so parodically boring and pretentious that I’d worry, if I didn’t call it out right up front and in the starkest-possible terms, you might buy the thing, get twelve or 21 pages deep, and then feel confident that it’s not for you.

Don’t do that.

Better just to skip that chapter! Because everything beyond those first 30 pages comprises a smart, poignant, stylish meditation on millennials’ angst, their waywardness, and the now-metastatic interlacing of work and the internet, sex and the internet, food and the internet. It’s just got a weird way of doing things. Those early pages are the literary equivalent of a dog doing that circle thing on the couch before lying down and being personable.

The outcome is a 300-page book that moves with the momentum of something well-plotted, which seems both ironic and remarkable, given that there is no plot.

A novel without a plot is like a person without a foot: they can be graceful enough that nobody notices, but it’s still a limitation.

The Sleepers even strikes a few chords of character insight to ring like wisdom. Those little nuggets are rare, and clunky, but they hit the mark. Like someone hurling a bowling ball through a dartboard and shouting “bullseye”: they’re not entirely wrong.

Example:

All her previous exes had at some point resisted becoming or being objects, space-occupiers. They had ended things before they became things.

Of a subtly hostile/needy exchange among three college students in a park, trading barbs and then feeling terrible, Gasda writes,

You were formed as a person by these little cuts, these little social rebukes; […they] form[ed] you into a personality with a place in a hierarchy. Childhood was a great sorting process where you figured out if you were passive or dominant or somewhere in the middle, a solid beta.

Maybe my favorite:

“Time disappears in direct proportion to the amount of energy we spend trying to hold onto it, I think.”

Not exactly Confucius, but The Sleepers is a New York novel, and Confucius doesn’t live there. What might otherwise sound like little aphoristic truisms we all nod about at a party are delivered here at just-right moments in an enveloping story, so that they ring truer than usual. Sort of how old people use more and more cliches in their speech, “lead a horse to water” and so on — they just have more and more lived examples of how accurate it is.

So Sleepers is delightful, it’s thought-provoking; where I start falling into a pickle with it is the idea that it’s a great reading experience, but just a so-so novel.

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Let’s say you’ve got chronic back pain. A form of treatment that works for you is getting professional massages. You get them a lot and you come to know the good from the bad.

One day you decide to try a new place. A discreet little parlor near home. You go inside and pay your fee and the masseur leads you to a little room. There’s music playing. You disrobe and lie down on the massage table. The masseur lights a candle and lathers up their hands with lotion and right away starts hitting you. Softly. It doesn’t hurt but it’s weird and you’re thinking, “This is a terrible massage,” except you dread even mentioning it to yourself because you and this masseur have mutual friends on Substack and you’re starting to regret this whole experience when suddenly your thoughts clear up, you’re in a daze, painless and climaxing and happy on the table.

You walk out feeling quite certain that, whatever this was, you’d recommend it to other people, and do it again yourself.

Massages are your thing, though. You swear by them. They make your life bearable and you can be a bit of a bore about the finer points of the craft.

So even rhapsodizing to neighbors about this strange new service, where your pain went away and you saw God and left a stain upon the leather, whenever people get excited and ask you what kind of massage it was you tell them, with a sudden strain in your smile, “Well um,” a nervous chuckle, a flutter of lashes, “I mean I can’t say it was really a massage…”

But you feel like an asshole, because how often do you get a massage that makes you feel this good?

Not often.

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Here’s an example of what I’m talking about when I say that The Sleepers isn’t doing what a novel oughta do, and I’ll harp mostly on the first chapter because it’s well-written, it’s got momentum, the hallmarks of its author’s talent; however, like its character, the whole chapter is obsessed with itself and takes for granted that you, the reader, are have so little going on in your life that you, as well, are going to sit still for six hours and listen to the psychoanalysis of a character who, in the course of this chapter, will do nothing more interesting than eat an omelet.

The character’s name is Akari and she’s sitting in a cafe, feeling lonely, texting her ex-girlfriend.

Was [Akari] being used [by her ex, Suzanne]? The cinematographer [Akari] wanted to reject the possibility, push it across the table like the scraps of napkin, but she couldnt. The potential truth just lay there, inert, but threatening, like an old attack dog. It wasn’t the case, it couldn’t be the case, it wasn’t possible for it to be the case, that the entirety of Suzanne’s affection was an attempt to gain connections—right?

GET IT?

Akari’s just flown into NYC and she’s heading over to her sister Mariko’s apartment. The narrator is telling us that these sisters have a strained relationship. The narrator is telling us that Akari is hungry and that she should eat now because otherwise she’ll end up ordering from the Polish place at midnight. The next narrator will tell us it’s always bad to eat late. In the chapter after that we’ll see someone making a terrible life decision while eating borscht at 2 a.m.

The narrator is telling us that she’s stopping into a cafe and ordering a drink from a waiter who’s handsome, probably an actor, and that she wants a bit of sweetness in her drink, but not from sugar (or stevia), and so she’ll have agave instead, and that she’s texting with her ex, and then when her drink arrives she decides she’ll order an omelet, and both she and the server seem surprised by this, and then she’s texting her ex again, and when the omelet arrives Akari takes a bite and the narrator tells us it isn't very good but Akari keeps on eating.

She started to think about her favorite Kurosawa movie, Ikiru, a film about mortality and regret.

So begins a halfpage summary of Ikiru and how it “captured [Akari’s] incredible sense of fleetingness, preciousness, fragility. It, life, would all be gone one day—and what would you have to show for it?”

At the end of the chapter she walks to her sister’s apartment and it’s empty so she masturbates.

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The whole book isn’t like this first chapter, but it’s a rich example of what pops up as a bother throughout the book (albeit less and less often).

In another chapter, following the thoughts of the older sister Mariko as she sits up alone, late at night, quietly hating her academic/writer boyfriend who sleeps in the next room, we get this observation:

He was more of a Calvinist than a Marxist: he believed that he was among the elect.

What an idiot!

Kidding: I don’t know the difference between those things.

Well, you might say, sounds like a personal problem.

Maybe. And I might be a person of decidedly average intelligence, and not all that worldly. But I do read a lot. And I paid the price of two big sandwiches or an IMAX ticket for this novel and, although I might nod along, with a pensive finger on my chin, as the author makes this reference to Mr. Calvin, and Mr. Marx, and how vastly different they are, the truth is I can’t even remember who’s the kid and who’s the tiger — and part of me resents that the author isn’t making some extra effort to hand me that information.

Well, you might say, the author is exploring the characters’ interiority and using their natural vocabulary to do it.

Yes and a more responsible reader than myself would surely put the book down and Google the terms that they don’t understand. They would improve themselves. Come back to the book and say, “Thank you, author. May I have another?”

But you wouldn’t think it was innocent if someone talked this way at a party — “He only thinks he’s a Marxist, he’s actually a Calvinist” — and then offered no explanation or example of what that means.

My biggest issue with The Sleepers is a sense that it doesn’t think too highly of its reader. Like these moneyed thirtysomethings can walk onto the page without any dramatic effort, on the author’s part, to seduce our interest.

A gunshot, a high-stakes meeting, a train that they’re going to miss—it doesn’t have to be super flashy but it’s always a hospitable gesture, from an author, to actually put some bait in their trap.

What The Sleepers does instead is it just starts talking.

Which feels presumptuous. At first. Frustrating.

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Doubly frustrating because this pretentious-seeming leap that the author takes, plunging into an omniscient monologue, ruminating on his characters, becomes (if you give it 40ish pages of runway) the novel’s greatest charm.

So it’s got this weird cumulative effect whereby the qualities that made it frustrating/pretentious in the beginning are what make it kinda sweet and endearing later on. Half-hypnotic. Beyond good. A skillful and realistic rendering of modern life and relationships (for some of us).

What’s particularly strong, near to the point of uncanny, is how Gasda crafts his prose to show the tech-flesh hybridity of millennial life. There’s a fluidity in how he summons a thought from a character, an observation, a movement, an action, a phone-check, another comment…

The phone is to Gasda’s cast what cigarettes are to Salinger’s. A totem, a weapon, a shield, a wand. An amplifier and a sedative. Something they turn to when they most want the thing they can’t admit wanting.

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Not that his credentials should factor too much into the assessment, but Gasda’s a playwright, and those skills turn up not just in the spoken dialogue between characters (which sounds natural, fluent, discreetly voicey) but in the way he keeps his characters constantly moving through the set.

They pick up a prop and mess with it. The characters talk around things. In the course of a conversation, one person gets the moral high ground, and then loses it; a couple, talking in the living room, will start out with small loaded remarks that blow up into an argument…and then dissolve into laughter…and then they’re groping each other’s crotches…and then someone says the wrong thing so that the sexual energy, the sense of intimacy, shifts toward intimate conversation about how incompatible they are.

They’re making out on the couch and then they’re lying on the floor. Things are getting heavy…but one of them has to step offstage and take a shit.

Meanwhile, the other character goes to the cabinet. Pours a shot of vodka.

When the other character comes out of the bathroom, their conversation continues in a different corner of the set (?).

That rolling quality of conversation gives a sense of travel, of movement; and if Gasda, as a playwright, is careful to make sure that the audience is kept engaged by having to move their neck, move their eyes, to keep track of the movement on stage — it’s got a curiously similar effect on the page.

At the bar where a professor meets a former student for a latenight flirt, he dips into his borscht every time she calls him out on something. It’s discreet, it’s literary/artful — but, thinking from the perspective of visual storytelling, it’s classic propwork.

The steady appearance of the borscht, or the omelet, or the vodka — it all helps to keep the book grounded in a real world.

It’s that millennial thing, about bodies.

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Gasda’s characters are constantly flushing a toilet with their bare toes, or rubbing their clit, or thinking fondly of someone’s foreskin or else they’re taking a shit, finding themselves weirdly obsessed with another person’s skin — and meanwhile, in all this fleshiness that runs through the text, they’re lamenting that the digital world has removed them from their bodies, from intimacy…

Stepping back from it here: I think I’ve realized belatedly that Daniel Falatko isn’t a millennial, but he’s enough of a cusper that technically yes he is, and over the past few months I’ve been reading what seem like decidedly millennial novels, thanks to Substack and they’re all quite different but they all have a couple things in common:

1. Characters with troubled/confused/euphoric relationships to their flesh-and-blood selves that are completely separate from their broader sense of self

2. Men who are imbued with power in their social circles, or a cultural/professional authority, but at the same time are destructively indecisive and feckless.

Falatko’s

wayback machine

shows a late Gen Xer’s physical alienation, coming out of prison after years in the fleshiest/most-debauched lifestyle into a high-tech world; Glass Century, by

Ross Barkan

, takes place in a mostly pre-digital world whose transition is marked by catastrophe (9/11); physical activity is depicted, throughout that book, as a kind of sacrament (be it tennis, baseball, vagabonding); The Default World, by

Naomi Kanakia

, has at its center a trans woman chasing the means for gender-affirming treatments, meanwhile living among hypersexed/beautiful millennials whose climactic achievement is a giant sex party in a warehouse (in which the protagonist, too, achieves a kind of peace with her body); Why Teach?, by

Peter Shull

, is frankly kinda repressed, as I mentioned in my review, but there’s a clear-seeming thread of its main character’s philosophical and professional isolation manifesting as a profound physical isolation, a loneliness, a lack of touch. Food, in that novel, is described and consumed as eagerly as the protagonist in a more footloose book might take drugs or have sex (i.e. it’s a way of using the body to cope with an emotion). I haven’t read

John Pistelli

’s Major Arcana yet but my understanding is there’s some exploration of “bodiness” in there too. So does my own book (he mentions discreetly), Cubafruit, in ways I hadn’t thought about until recently.

The Sleepers falls in line with this, but I think it’s the first one to be so (clunkily/effectively) direct about it.

When was the last time he felt like he inhabited the body that carried him from place to place, day to day?

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The Sleepers is the kind of book that doesn’t tell you a story so much as keep you company. It’s voicey and eloquent and decidedly warm. It’s got some issues that make me question its efficacy as a novel, in the traditional sense, but as a reading experience it was great.

And how often does a new book provide such an experience?