“Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, I was not there.” These words by the medieval writer John Mandeville, quoted by Welsh poet David Jones in the preface to his World War I memoir in verse, In Parenthesis, suggest themselves equally as a motto for The Sleepers, the new novel by playwright and critic Matthew Gasda, author of Dimes Square and Doomers. The novel’s setting is another strange “parenthesis” of time: not war (although some of Gasda’s metaphors will suggest otherwise) but the eve of what was expected to be Hillary Clinton’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, in not-quite-trendy Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It is autumn in the less than belle époque of Millennial socialism, and the leaves are, as if in sympathy, “simply dying: falling off the branch, half-green, in unusual late September heat.”
A prologue-like first chapter introduces the characters: Akari, visiting from Los Angeles; her sister, Mariko, an off-Broadway actress; and Mariko’s longtime boyfriend, Dan, an English professor and rising Twitter star. It also presents the principal themes: After delaying meeting Mariko and Dan, Akari winds up alone at their apartment, sexting her ex-girlfriend back in LA and masturbating on the couch (a characteristic regression into sex in the head).
Next, we are taken back to Dan and Mariko’s apartment the previous evening, where there is a stagnancy within them and between them. Mariko has stopped auditioning. Dan’s online activities—his arguments and half-aware flirtations—increasingly consume the energy needed for work and his relationship. The absence of a child is either the drain around which the couple’s other problems circle, or the symptom of more obscure unfulfillments. (We learn that Dan is still brooding over the suicide of his mother, back home in Ohio, two years earlier. Amputated from the source of life, he also suffers the side effects of antidepressants, chiefly impotence, which he treats secretly with additional meds.) Mariko, meanwhile, has her own forms of avoidance: “Some part of her clung to control, to pseudo-rationality, to convention, and structure,” the narrator tells us. “Her relationship was designed to keep chaos out—and, in that sense, it served its function very well.”
Into this void comes a voice—mediated, as usual—to throw all into confusion. Abandoned to the living-room couch after an aborted attempt at sex, Dan does what any Millennial of his age and temperament would do: He opens his laptop. This time, however, he is promptly accosted via DM: “hey what’s what up?” The author is Eliza, one of his students from the previous semester. In the mutual flirtation that follows, Dan finds himself flooded with half-remembered excitement, curiosity, eagerness, trepidation, befuddlement—everything that his not-quite-marriage has frozen out. The action quickly escalates to a late-night visit to a diner in Manhattan’s East Village, thence to Eliza’s upscale apartment nearby, all while Mariko sleeps.
The Sleepers aims at something larger than chronicling metropolitan life of a decade ago. In a recent Substack comment, taking up a suggestion by the critic and scholar Anthony Galluzzo, its author has speculated on a distinctive pathology of our age: “We’re all on this spectrum of splitting now…splitting and disassociation is pestilent, widespread, and depriving our social, romantic, and spiritual intercourse of all variety, color, warmth, and charm.” The thought chimes with the novel, which captures not only the texture of a modern life addicted to distractions but also such distractions’ spiritual meaning. Apps allow Gasda’s characters to exist suspended, both in space—the semipublic places of the restaurant, the surfed couch in the rented apartment, the sunbaked park exhaling its steam of Instagram snaps—and in life. They have sex at a distance, or by proxy, after tantalizing themselves with other options. Anything to evade their own thoughts, their own souls.
Yet talk of “splitting” also raises the prospect of a wholeness: of a self that would not vary across its platforms. A tall order, no doubt. The fullness of being that the Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller saw as the aim of aesthetic education (and which he associated with an idealized classical Greece) scarcely seems possible to the commitment-fearing Brooklynites who are the protagonists of The Sleepers.
The strength of the novel, however, is its ability to show that hope is not altogether misplaced. There remains a promise in life, and the characters, in sleeping through existence, waste a possession of worth. This hope partly resides in a sense of the world itself as divided—as containing its own degraded and vital versions. Flashes of natural beauty are intimations of beneficence, as is an intermittently less despairing sense of the city as a supra-individual organism, hinting at a more benignant interconnectedness than the kind that currently rends the characters’ lives. Erotic life, too, holds a promise, even if an anxious, punitive culture—perhaps, one character will suggest, in an emanation of individual self-hatred—devotes the bulk of its energy to warding this off.
There is a link between these divisions and the novel’s most enigmatic split—that between the plane on which the characters interact and the narratorial voice. From the first page, we find ourselves in the presence of a consciousness—reflective, articulate, authoritative—uncertainly distributed between the characters and the work. Its judgments are apodictic, with an assertive brutality that can give rise to occasional awkwardness (one minor example of which is the intrusive identification of the characters by abstract type: “the cinematographer partied,” “the actress opened the fridge,” “The professor flicked over to Facebook”), yet can also present images of striking beauty, often with their own diagnostic edge (“Dan’s mind quickly moved from branch to branch of his basic anxiety”).
That this abstraction coexists with what is rightly acknowledged among Gasda’s virtues as a writer—his considerable, if at times rather scabrous, emotional intelligence—is only an apparent paradox. It is part of the spirit of the age that individuals understand themselves as types—including as ranked possibilities, where the type establishes the basis for comparison. It is as types that they act during mimetic frenzies of vengeance, such as that which overtakes Dan once Eliza decides, after graduation, to report him to the school authorities, a development in which Mariko takes secret satisfaction, overlooking the contradictions in her own personal history.
There is also, in this willingness to cut to the heart of things, an elegance and a strange tenderness. Conflict, in this talky novel, is allied to truth—avoiding one means losing the other. To overcome avoidance is to arrive at those moments when the “raw creature” is seen in its nudity and vulnerability. “In a perverse way, Mariko thought,” toward the novel’s close, “it was like you couldn’t really appreciate a person until you could properly peer beneath the ego-layer, and just see them as a raw being, a raw creature.” Though some might question this vision (is the “raw creature” the whole person or just the other side of false New York opinion?), it clearly lies at the core of the novel’s twining of love and forgiveness.
As sometimes with the author’s plays, a first reading of The Sleepers can leave one with a sense of both power and a certain deferral. The scene remains the compositional unit, and Gasda’s way of setting up a situation, complicating it discursively, and then leaping into the aftermath can generate a feeling of incompleteness. Yet the work complicates itself on additional readings. A return to the beginning reveals the intricacy of its construction, its symbolic heft, the intimations and ironies that sound like no other contemporary.
Like D.H. Lawrence, Gasda knows that “One sheds one’s sicknesses in books.” Taking himself as representative, he seeks thereby to help the age shed its sicknesses as well. Decisive accomplishment, for such a restless spirit, reveals itself in retrospect; he is building a corpus rather than a series of monuments. Part of that retrospect, however, is built into The Sleepers itself: an ostensibly slight work that, in its pauses and peripheral visions, conveys its characters’ sense of “the century moving over them like water.” Vivid and elusive, it finds its second life in the mind—as befits the work of this strangely lucid dreamer.