“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.