Matthew Gasda’s 'The Sleepers': Trapped in an Age of Reflection

According to Soren Kierkegaard, there are ages of reflection and ages of passion. Imagine, he says, that someone throws a gold doubloon onto the middle of a frozen pond. It is unclear how thick the ice is and whether it is safe to walk on. In an age of passion, the onlookers will be excited: they want to see who is going to run out and get the doubloon. However, in an age of reflection, they immediately start to criticize any prospective doubloon-retriever. They murmur amongst themselves— “It was practically fifty degrees yesterday.” “The ice just looks thin.” “Doesn’t this idiot know that someone fell in last year and almost died?”

Matt Gasda’s new novel, The Sleepers, implicitly makes the argument that we are in an age of reflection rather than one of passion. His book incisively dissects the nature of this era, picking apart characters nerve by nerve, tendon by tendon, to reveal the innermost anatomical secrets of New York intellectuals. At the same time, there are some surprisingly sexy passages in the book—yet these moments of passion (or, at least, recreation) only highlight by contrast the void-like world in which they occur. Under Gasda’s objective, almost scientific scrutiny, these characters flail through the God-shaped hole they inhabit, never suspecting that there might be a way to live other than the profoundly inadequate, pre-fabricated one they’ve been handed.

Gasda is best known as a playwright, author of the underground hit Dimes Square, which captured the mood of a certain artistic milieu on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the COVID-era. In a period when political and identity-related concerns dominated theatre, Gasda proved notable for striking out in a different direction and making his own way. His novel brings the same capacity for intense observation that has characterized his playwriting to a new medium. In the sections of dialogue, with their dueling quality, you can see a playwright’s craft at work. These passages are complemented by longer sections in which we burrow into the characters’ emotional and cerebral lives. They seem to be in a petri dish, subject, by design, to the exact notations of the writer’s mind. Gasda is intimately aware of the motivations and thought patterns of educated New Yorkers in academia and the arts, and, without making overt judgments, his narrative casts them in a coldly revealing light.

Sleepers tells the story of a New York couple occupying the social semi-Bohemian middle. Daniel is a Marxist professor at The New School while his girlfriend, Mariko, is an aspiring actress. They are both somewhat unhappy, leading lives of quiet or only occasionally noisy desperation, lives “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Their relationship has lost its spark, leading Dan to pursue an affair with a college student, Eliza, who hits on him over Facebook Messenger one night. At the same time, Mariko is drawn towards her mentor, Xavier, who has recently been diagnosed with cancer. As if multiple levels of adultery weren’t enough to complicate a weekend, they’re also entertaining a houseguest, Mariko’s sister, Akari, who is visiting town from LA. Akari is contemplating reconciling with her former lover, Suzanne, which provides a counterpoint to Mariko and Dan’s floundering relationship.

Dan is plagued by excessive reflection. Lacking any capacity to launch a social revolution, he is condemned to take verbal potshots from the cheap seats via blog post. When rebelling against the grayness of his own life and relationship, he can only summon enough imagination and energy to self-destructively pursue his student, whose personality is festooned with red flags. This passage typifies Dan’s essential attitude:

“Dan sighed to himself. He’d spent his entire academic career working to deconstruct and deflate truth to the point where the word, the concept, only made him feel dead and empty whenever it was invoked. Truth conjured up a world of unthought, unanalyzed values—adolescence, childhood, whatever his parents told him, or his teachers taught him.”

Mariko is also by no means immune to similarly corrosive reflections, which hold truth at bay. At one point, we peak inside her consciousness: “…she knew that he [Dan] couldn’t stop calculating, adjusting, rationalizing; he needed to maintain power and self-esteem at all times (but then again she was the same way).” These characters are all caught in a whirlpool of constant ratiocination, imprisoning themselves in ever narrowing circles. In their eyes, it seems to promise survival, but it is the very thing that’s sucking them under the surface.

Eliza too is infected by the reflection virus, but in a different way. Whereas Dan criticizes the world ineffectually, Eliza reflects constantly on her own social position and appearance. She is hyperconscious of what the ever-present invisible crowd—whether represented by social media or classmates or some more nebulous They—is thinking about her. Thus, what she wants never remains the same for more than a few minutes, and she can never bring it clearly into focus. Does she want to have an affair with her professor? Does she even like him? Or does she want to publicly destroy him? Her desires are continually buffeted by the stray social winds blowing around her. As Gasda writes, “Everything was happening to her, and she didn’t know why.”

Gasda’s novel is excellently observed, and what he observes is life-in-death, a kind of somnambulism—hence the title. Paraphrasing Radiohead, these characters aren’t living, they’re just killing time. And they kill time to ultimately destructive effect. Yet, simultaneously, sleep fulfills a protective function for these characters. They’re intentionally trying to numb themselves against the pain and vacuity of their lives—indulging in what Gasda calls “the sleep of the soul,” until they feel that nothing can harm them. Ironically, this results in even worse pain.

Of course, it could be that the pain they are avoiding is the pain necessary to prick them awake, shock them into the very state of agency and freedom they’ve been so assiduously avoiding. Only briefly do they consider what it would be like to shed their threadbare nihilism and walk naked and free in the light of a new revelation. Instead, they disappear “into [their] own mistakes like a bird slipping into a cloud.” This, I think, is the core of Gasda’s diagnosis. But he doesn’t editorialize; he lets the facts speak for themselves.

Representing this immensely futile world might seem like a drag, but the acuity of Gasda’s intelligence and powers of perception prevents it from seeming like one. He shouldn’t, by any means, be confused with what he describes. He is simply being real about his place and time—yet his depiction of this doomed sleepwalkers’ world springs from a much livelier creative intellect than that possessed by his characters. It lends the book a certain poignancy and should give anyone depressed by the world Gasda portrays a certain amount of—dare one say it?—hope.