New York Groove

On Matthew Gasda's 'The Sleepers'

Francis Bacon, Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966, Oil on canvas

A narrative strategy of ambivalence is often a sure bet in the realistic novel. Gustave Flaubert complained that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, didn’t need to “make observations” about chattel slavery in the United States, she only needed to “depict it: that’s enough.” Flaubert’s observations still inspire writers and critics who argue the author should be a deity. On the other hand, we have the Bob Dylan of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” directing the congregant when it’s time to withhold tears, and when it’s time to cry. In his new novel, The Sleepers, Matthew Gasda rolls the dice more on the French side. It’s an ambivalent work that, at first glance, seems more contemporary than it is.

We begin with Akari. We will all be as lucky as Akari, or so the novel leads us to believe. She arrives in New York from Los Angeles, a film industry worker, a UCLA grad, “toned and lean from yoga and Pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was.” This long person walks instead of waiting for the “G” train, an in-joke local readers of this novel will recognize. Around her, people seem to be “running on some alternate energy source that did not burn as cleanly or as efficiently as sleep.”

Akari is the least straight and happiest person in the book. Which is why she dreads going to visit her sister, Mariko, often called Mari, and Mari’s boyfriend, Dan, whose relationship “rots” on a tree-lined street in North Brooklyn. Autumn approaches, for this large cast of characters, with its “cool nights, warm days.” Nobody has kids, although a “toddler,” described as “cooing,” gets tossed around later. Nobody has pets. Everyone’s a misandrist, if that’s still the password for a patchy hatred of the very idea of men. It’s a world running on money, and everyone fits right in.

For Akari, “the game-layer of life was more interesting than life itself.” She’s addicted to her phone. In the phone, she’s troubled by the suicidal thoughts of Suzanne, a longer-term hookup. “Between the casual, off-hand nature of [Suzanne’s] lifestyle and the underlying morbidity of her thoughts.” The streets of New York, late in the novel described as a “sadness generator,” push Akari through Williamsburg and into Greenpoint, a neighborhood switch Gasda deftly handles throughout the book. Choosing to dine at “one of those generic American food gastropubs that served expensive burgers with aioli,” Akari ends up, so to speak, back at the airport: bland, transitional, and overpriced.

We know Akari. Online or in real life. From streaming shows, from Brooklyn books. The reader’s ability to be moved by her life — and the struggles of Gasda’s characters in general — will depend on how fed up we are with their stories. Gasda’s gifts as a writer keep the story appetizing. But if a critic wanted to pan The Sleepers, they would memorialize the line, said of a film near the end of the book: “It’s just Brooklynite fan fiction; it’s honestly disgusting.”

Best known as the playwright of Dimes Square (“We are living through the dumbest time in human history”), Gasda wants to write New York characters, New York scenes. He sets the bulk of The Sleepers in 2016, and that is his privilege, but sometimes I wished it were illegal to set novels in the “recent past.” Such books can arrive asking for a handout from a reader who knows better. Nevertheless, Gasda knows his recent past characters. They say all the right things, especially when they contradict themselves. Often I wished they would say just one uncharacteristic thing, but the author is too adept at characterization to let anything uncharacteristic happen.

The Sleepers is plotted well, which keeps us skimming pages, but I detected anxiety in the novel’s authorial and narrative distance. Sometimes the point of view feels unsure of itself. Sparse dialogue tagging blurs speakers together, as if all sad Brooklynites share the same voice. That obliquity is part of the novel’s design. But I could come away from a reading period thinking the narrator felt there was little to learn about his own people. A narrator who constrains people to their professions — the cinematographer (Akari), the professor (Dan), the actress (Mari), the director (Xavier) — as if Gasda “the novelist” has a nervous tick for the dramatis personae of a playscript, where profession and age can be immediately known.

In those moments, The Sleepers began to resemble something else: not quite a novel, but a play in hiding. I was reminded of Gasda’s quibble with Mike Crumplar’s review of Dimes Square, because the review, in Crumplar’s reportage of the conversation, “unjustly flattened him [Gasda] onto the subjects he was trying to ambivalently represent.” And maybe that’s what we want from the stage director. But is that what we want from the novelist? Ambivalently represented Brooklynites of the recent past? Distance, where intimacy would be the greater good? Ambivalence so finely calibrated, it mistakes our numbness for understanding.

I found much to admire in The Sleepers. It’s my kind of book. Careful portraits of disconnected, networked New Yorkers — young or young-at-heart — with the occasional wink to an audience that bought tickets during the presale. Reading it before bed I was jolted awake by one of its lovely observations. But I couldn’t help wishing its author took more risks. “Great writers of fiction,” Arnold Bennett tells us, “are by the mysterious nature of their art ordained to be amateurs.” The author of The Sleepers is many things, but an amateur isn’t one of them.

It’s Mariko, Akari’s sister, whose troubled relationship with Dan forms the novel’s uneasy heart. We meet Mari the midnight before Akari’s arrival. As usual, she can’t sleep. “Late at night, her subconscious would pound on.” Mari is a would-be artist “battling so much inertia,” who cannot create new work in New York, but only pine for “the few great plays in existence.” “She’d stopped auditioning, really making an effort to have a career. It was much easier to ignore her ambitions, to pretend that her desires had never existed, than to commit to them, and to the possibility of failure.”

Gasda places Mari in situations that try to reawaken her ambition, but mostly she will “question, pick-apart, worry, analyze and talk to herself.” She’s certainly not going to wake up her boyfriend, Dan, to try and get to sleep the old-fashioned way. Red-haired Dan is “half-bald and paunchy — his body embarrassed her.” Educated at the Ivies, the professor is “completely invested in the world of argument and counterargument,” although “his ideas, organically expressed, were gnomic and aphoristic.” “The serious intellectual work,” and here we are in Mari’s mind, “his early scholarship, had merely served to qualify him for the role of bullshitter.”

Dan invites even more bullshit into his life when he receives a social media message from a former student, Eliza, described as having “inquiring green eyes” and being “Latina.” The narrator proclaims the internet has destroyed Eliza’s “indigenous interiority.” She’s also high on stimulants, and still young enough to believe, the morning after, that those weren’t working on her own indecision in the night. Like Dan, she’s got mother issues, which is maybe what brings them together. While many of our male or female writers of psychological realism can easily post up the professor, it takes a rarer kind of male writer, with a higher level of sensitivity, to do the same for the student.

Eliza and Dan go on in the sharply written italicized-internet-messenger-dialogue that reads like the grunt work of Gasda’s otherwise formal prose. Then they brashly meet IRL, sitting close at an after-hours diner in the East Village. Dan thinks, “the little subcurrents of potential energy, circulating back and forth between them felt amazing.” Gasda is amazing with the word “amazing.” This reader always felt amazing, too. But soon enough, we tunnel into the long play of student-teacher sexual politics and #MeToo politics in particular. The professor, getting hornier, believes he is in a “reversal of power” situation — that he’s giving Eliza the reins. “‘I like your soul,’ Dan said, trying to rise to the occasion. ‘It’s pretty fucking fascinating slash amazing.’”

“You lusted after your own student . . . ”

“You initiated it!”

“But still, you lusted.”

“But what’s wrong with that?”

“It’s more the student part.”

“I’m not sure what counts as ethics,” Dan offers his future accuser, mansplaining some Victorian doorstoppers. “There are different [ethical] traditions.” Dan turns out to be wrong about that, too, for what we have in Eliza and Dan’s story is the monoculture of the recent past. The student ruins the professor’s life, although a complex of reasons contribute. The irony for the professor is that Eliza, like Swann’s Odette, “wasn’t even his type.” How often, in bookish novels, bookish men get ruined by the atypical.

Meanwhile, Mariko has her own affair with Xavier, a theater director dying of cancer. He is the player Dan could’ve grown up to be if Dan manned up. We’re not wrong to take away the message that theater directors are cooler than professors who carry “the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass” in their briefcase.

This short section, a history and renewal of a love affair which earned Mari roles in those “few great plays in existence,” offers countervailing perspectives on “lust” and “student” power, and serves as a Rothian intersession in The Sleepers. Gasda has mined this elegiac territory in earlier works, and it continues to be interesting here, though it tests my patience that Gasda’s aging declaimers make expert love to these “daughters,” who must also listen to their expert speeches on the power of art.

The actress arrives on what Xavier heralds as “the last day of his life before he started dying.” He’s weak, but alert enough to make sure she’s on the pill. Again, one of Roth’s potent fictions, currently radiating through Michelle Williams’ Molly in Dying for Sex: as everything else kicks the bucket, sexual desire grows. Eliza the college student thinks “desire in the body and desire in the mind are completely different things,” but Gasda’s wilting director knows that’s teenage talk.

I might have left Xavier out of my review but his energy is obviously important to Gasda, and as a set piece these pages effectively bridge the novel into the concluding chapters. The writing cauterizes itself here: more commas, more melancholy, more care. Gasda’s wager pays off, for a moment. Xavier, whom the narrator calls “the director,” thinks to himself: “Tragedy was an onstage, not offstage, event, something that happened to somebody else; and death itself, its actual meaning — was always offstage, was always somewhere else.” The novelist might ask: who is more offstage than the director?

When we last see Dan, things have changed for the worse. Gasda is unsubtle about what getting got by the green-eyed Latina does to his man. Dan is stumped, “as in a war,” living alone in a corner of Brooklyn that might as well be his birthplace, a “new development outside of Cincinnati.” He’s frying eggs in yesterday’s swine grease instead of “a slick of olive oil,” and having mindless and bodiless hookups, under assumed names, with surgically altered feminists. Dan won’t overcome the glitch in the patriarchy that canceled him and his book deal, nor the matrilineal trauma that proves much worse. If we are to trust our dying dramatist, Xavier, a tragedy must happen onscreen, and Dan’s demands the stage. In a novel rich in ideas about nodding off — sexually, socially, and artistically — his fate ought to startle us awake.

And yet: who mourns for Dan? Or has Gasda swaddled him so tightly in the frameworks of the recent past that mourning becomes impossible? Would it be helpful — wouldn’t it be so fucking amazing — if the author shed his ambivalence and instructed us, “bury the rag deep in your face, for now’s the time for your tears”? For Mari and Dan, “intimacy had become so political that it was impossible to know what the implications of physical surrender would be.” The Sleepers shares that difficulty with its readers. Maybe that’s why, arriving in 2025, it does little more than break even.

Stuart Ross

is the author of The Hotel Egypt.