the playwright writes a novel
*a review of The Sleepers*
Matthew Gasda’s much anticipated upcoming novel is out May 6. He sent me a galley to review on my Substack.
The aphoristic and the dramatic blend in The Sleepers in a messy yet intriguing melange.
Set it Brooklyn in the fall of 2016, the novel introduces a cast of characters trapped in a kind of spiritual quicksand. Of principal concern is the relationship between lapsed-actress Mariko and live-in boyfriend/pseudo-intellectual Dan. The two engage in risky entanglements as the viability of their relationship hangs in the balance.
Gasda is most known for his theater work, from his 2022 hit Dimes Square to the recently debuted Doomers. He also publishes the quippy and often delightful Substack Novalis, and his forthcoming book Writer’s Diary (which I imagine is derived in part from his Substack posts) is also due out in September.
Of these influences, it is the aphorism that lands the most punches, as when his characters arrive at some universal insight through their torturously horny interiorities. “The highest form of student teacher bond was erotic,” Dan narrates. Indeed, such subversions are the engine of the novel, and there is almost always some power-play or generational confusion informing the psyches of the characters.
The drama waxes and wanes in a strobing intensity, in which an ambivalent fullness of feeling is elucidated in great detail. Gasda treats emotions like brushwork, mixing them together is an unexpected Freudian color theory: “There was grief in this reversion to nameless hunger, revulsion at the erotic conditions of life. It made him angry.”
There’s a punishing exactness to this emotional titration, with frequent mention to characters’ fluctuating levels of arousal. Somatic demands whorl underneath the intellectual sturm und drang. What binds it all together is a dissatisfaction at tediously comfortable lives. As Gasda puts it, these characters can’t “figure out how to enjoy the consumption lifestyle.” Or, more concretely, “Twitter made [Dan’s] brain go haywire. It felt amazing.”
Often, this emotional exploration gives way to some visceral revulsion; notably, shits taken and described in diagnostic detail. We get “The professor hung on the edge of the plastic bowl, wiping himself” (the least graphic line from that passage). When the act isn’t enough, there must be the reflection on the act, as when Eliza “start[s] to think about all the other shits she’[s] taken in public bathrooms in New York.”
This Brooklynite drama of manners situates within obvious genres - the künstlerroman, the New-York-roman, the millennial-ennui-roman, the caca-roman. As with many such works, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation looms large, with the same sardonic attitude towards the life of the mind and with similarly conspicuous pooping.
The book structurally resembles a Johnathan Franzen novel, with large sections devoted to a close third-person POV and parallax perspectives opened by shifting to another character. The Sleepers, like Franzen’s The Corrections, concerns the fall from grace of a middling academic, sibling rivalries, and a sexuality that is frequently mediated by drugs. It is ultimately less ambitious, though, and where Franzen seeks for grand solutions to problems of loyalty, freedom, and love, Gasda would be happy with just a workable path forward. Maybe it’s the frequent aphoristic turn, but it can read as a parable, a how-not-to guide for living the life barely examined.
“She carried herself with the grace of disappointment,” he writes of Mariko, of one of his many characters who hope that their disappointments might amount to something, anything.
The book struggles at times with the changeable POV, with sentences wandering unstably from one character’s perspective to another. The playwright desires to block the action; the novelist desires to interiorize it. What we get is a perspective bursting at the seams: “Dan wanted to say that an abundance of caution about commitment had led them to where they were now, or led him to the low state he currently occupied, but that struck Mariko as a selfish interpretation on his part, one which completely elided his own hubris.” This is juxtaposed by long scenes of bickering dialogue that one senses would play better on the stage (sometimes with what feels like stage notes in parentheticals).
Gasda refers to the novel as a period piece. While the chronological markers are few and far between (largely references to the 2016 election), he successfully captures the vibe of a pre-Trump, pre-#MeToo, and pre-Pandemic New York. The naïveté of the text winks at the reader; for all the pervasive unhappiness, one cannot but feel like it’s all just going to get worse. This is most obvious in the character of Dan, whose rapidly thinning (going, going, gone) hair presages nothing good.
“Time escaped in strange ways, excusing itself like a guest at a party, never really saying goodbye, shutting the door before he could say goodnight,” Gasda writes. “He felt ashamed, and horny,” Gasda also writes. Somewhere between these poles lies The Sleepers: elegant and vulgar, confounding and provocative.
