Review: “The Sleepers” by Matthew Gasda

The Sleepers

Matthew Gasda

Skyhorse Publishing, May 2025

On the one hand: haven't we had enough?

Do we really need to hear about the empty lives and unsatisfying relationships of the Brooklyn cold-brew class ever again?

8/10ths of all books produced by and for this class, forever beamed out to the hinterlands, to all the rubes and suckers who consume them with interest, resentment or envy or some mix of the three, the searchlight beam of the Publishers Weekly deal announcements like a kind of background radiation, a medieval caste system: peasants and nobles.

They're miserable. We get it. They're addicted to social media and porn and attention and maximizing "experiences” and their sex lives and accruing status in diminishing cottage-industries (academia, literature, art-world).

Wasn't Marriage Story definitive? Or any 39-year-old big-city divorce novel? Or any A24 movie?

On the other hand, an accelerationist view: don't we need to see more? More openly satirical portrayals of their emptiness? More and more and more, so much that it’s eventually sealed into a coffin and drowned in a cold pond?

We all live in a certain ambiance. We know an ambiance. Its ok, its fine. Most writers and filmmakers and playwrights live submerged in an ambiance.

But is any of this healthy? Why not give up entirely and instead write about forgotten people? Why not just renounce and breathe the good green air of simplicity?

In some ways, this is the situation with The Sleepers. It captures a world of Brooklyn socialist/creative intelligentsia, let's say a period of 2015-2019.

It is a good novel. I admire its formal, neutral qualities.

But the problem for this novel is that it is being released right now, when I sense everyone is kind of burnt out and exhausted from hearing about this group—even if its hearing about them satirically.

This novel traces a very recent history, and I'm not sure its a period anyone is quite ready to go back to—the birth of woke, the heyday of the Verso-Bernie-socialist, MeToo, etc. People understandably want to memory-hole it because it is embarassing, but I'd say the larger problem is that is simply not romantic. Maybe one day it will be. Perhaps in ten years.

There's a great scene in the movie Spaceballs where Rick Moranis is horrified by a video taken of himself literally moments before and says:

No, no, no, go past this part. In fact, never play this again.

That’s a little bit how I felt, but it's not quite so dire with The Sleepers. I found myself thinking about Amber Frost’s memoir Dirtbag, the deal of which was announced at the peak of the “dirtbag left” phenomenon. When it finally came out two years later—whether due to big publishing’s glacial pace of production or Frost—it was just too late. No one cared anymore. People were over it.

That said, put alongside much of the tripe of the last seven years, The Sleepers stands out. I think it's an accomplishment. I think it will age well. Gasda's a playwright, used to working with human material, so the dialogue is excellent, the prose is very good.

At the center of the book are three Brooklynites of a 2014-2021 vintage: Dan, Akari and Mariko.

Dan is a self-satisfied rising young Verso-academic professor, still horny but getting paunchy, determined to make his way on the tenure-track.

He and Mariko are in a sexless Greenpoint houseplants-but-no-children relationship.

Mariko is a bit lost, unable to pursue her dreams and is working in the service industry.

Mariko is horny for some real passion from Dan but can't seem to say so.

Dan has been distant ever since a trip they took to Greece.

There is a bit of a Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. thing going on with the Dan character. Literary intellectual blowhard fuckboi (Or maybe I'm just out-of-date and that's my only frame of reference for novels like this.)

There are some great sentences in the book, mostly around Dan and Mariko's grim relationship:

"During the trip they had taken to Greece in August, they only had sex twice: the first and last nights. Strangely, however, Dan had always been careful to appear affectionate in public, at hotels, on the street, at museums, at restaurants—as if they were experiencing new love. Death by decorum."

Also:

"Somehow, she sensed that he was growing hard; she didn’t have to look under the table; there was a pressure, perhaps just blood-pressure, which indicated to her that he was undergoing a physiological change. Encouraged, she squeezed his hands as if he were a hospital patient. She felt a slight wetness between her thighs too.

What was happening?

Probably nothing, a false signal amidst the noise of rage. She’d made him feel defensive so that he would use arousal, sex, offensively, to fight back, reclaim the ground he’d lost. She was good at manipulating him."

Dan and Mariko have a fight, a fight on the level of intellect and rationality but remain romantically and sexually imbalanced—Dan gets randomly hard at moments where Mariko is lost in her thoughts, and she gets horny when all Dan wants to do is ramble on about politics and culture—both of them are desperately horny but can't seem to bring themselves to a pressure-valve-release fuck.

At the key moment of Mariko's desire, the possibility they might have sex for the first time in a long time, Dan goes into the bathroom to "shit" and disappears for a long time. Did he jack off? I don’t know. Mariko loses her mojo.

Dan stays up after Mariko falls asleep, and finds himself responding to a flirty late-night Facebook message from one of his students, Eliza. He suggests they meet up in the middle of the night at a diner and literally sneaks out on his girlfriend.

Eliza is an early-20s-something with dreams of working in culture and the arts, who is in bloom both sexually and intellectually and just learning to wield her sexuality for fun and profit.

This meet-up, once again, doesn't lead to fucking—Eliza just wants him to desire and see her, but she's also turned off by his fumblingness with the encounter and lets him go. This leads Dan to be self-conscious and pursue her via text in a desperate, needy way, which turns her off more and makes her lose respect for him.

The best parts of the novel are the ones that get at the heart of the imbalance between the primal and the intellectual with these kinds of people, the doomed quality of their relationships.

The book is driven by interiority and long dialogues between the characters—they cannot reach each other. These lengthy, stunted dialogues between people are not tedious, they are perhaps the best writing in the book.

Dan is the best developed character in the book—the most believable. Also, the perfect name for him. A lot of us have known a Dan—and his name was probably Dan. I also think, for a man, Gasda has done a pretty good job with the women characters’ interiority.

Dan eventually gets MeTooed by Eliza and engages in the recessed, slightly-unhappy afterlife of metooed men. Mariko gets married and has a kid, but she too is unhappy and lonely in her fate. Such is life.

***

Gasda did not invent "Dimes Square" but was the first to encase it in the amber of a formal art object, where the artistic process seemed to be in organic harmony with the end result—his project was not an expose or cruel novel or a party-dispatch passed off as serious journalism, it was a play, made up of non-trained-actors, first started in parks and apartments and slowly moving its way onto a proper stage.

I admire this way of working. I like the band Fugazi. I like when things grow slowly and organically up from the soil they are rooted in. I like when things have a root.

Besides, Christian (Lorentzen) seemed to have confidence in him, Christian was in the play, and I trust Christian’s aesthetic judgment—NYC literary world’s Father Time. I also feel: this is what aging NYC literary guys without children have to do, they have to hang out, go to parties, make themselves relevant to each generation, and each generation, its always passing on to the next generation. Christian had been part of the Delillo/Foster Wallace generation, then the n + 1/Paris Review generation, now has survived and persisted to become the grand old shepherd/connector of the Dimes Square/Sov house generation (which also now seems to be in the process of passing on.)

I never saw Gasda’s “Dimes Square” play, but I heard good things. I properly left New York around 2019, when the old world was dying but the new world had not yet been born, and have periodically felt pangs of regret that I might have just barely missed out on something I could resonate with.

I didn't really resonate with the previous literary generation—I remember getting so annoyed when all the fancy-pants n + 1 "intellectuals" who threw themselves all at once into Occupy, like it was their '68 Columbia University revolution, and then even more annoyed when everyone threw themselves into either academic-postcolonialism or “materialist socialism.”

I’ve watched the new reactionary NYC lit scene with interest from afar and got texts from friends saying, "it's a totally different thing now, its weird, right-wing e-girls everywhere, all the poets are fascists and reactionaries and MAGA, Sov House, Earth, etc."

When I first heard about Matt Gasda rising—I am ashamed to say, I thought, who is this little beep. Writes plays. Plays about the emerging downtown culture scene. Probably one of those Upper East Side-manor-born who without an ounce of shame call themselves "public intellectuals."

Probably born to a Central Park West culture mommy who loves David Mamet and uses the NYT recipes to cook Thanksgiving, because who else in America would have the gall to write plays in the 2020s?

Probably wears a turtleneck. Looked at a photo of him on the internet. Yep, wearing a turtleneck.

But then I listened to a few interviews and read a few things from Gasda and found out I liked what he wrote. I found his bearing and writing to be unobjectionable and good. I was happily surprised by his accent, whatever it was—it was without a trace of Upper East Side NYC supremacy—I don’t know his actual background but he sounded kind of neutral, midwestern almost, maybe way upstate. Something about him struck me as those thoroughly midwestern prairie writers who came to the city and made their way, upright people with good values and good style.

Gasda somehow reminds me of that earlier chronicler of New York bohemia, Jonathan Larson, who wrote the musical Rent, who I’ve always had a soft spot for.

Rent might be considered Disney+ fare these days but there was a time when it was a kind of avant-garde musical about squatters, AIDS, cops and art.

And bohemia. Writing about New York bohemia is almost always a smart career move because the big things in New York bohemia, as I mentioned earlier, always get beamed out to the rubes in the hinterlands. The only thing these groups like more than getting photographed and written up in Vanity Fair is being captured for posterity in the artistic amber of immortality—an actual play or a novel.

Well, we’ve come to the end, this feels a bit like an anticlimactic. But that’s all I got. Read the novel. Read Gasda. Don’t judge people or books by their cover. Read about Jonathan Larson and his strange, untimely death at 35. And enjoy the original soundtrack to Rent.