A Wake Up Call for Millennials

A review of "The Sleepers" by Matthew Gasda

It’s hard to know who else inhabits your various online worlds, but those in mine have seen reviews of

Matthew Gasda

’s The Sleepers everywhere.

Philip Traylen

calls the novel “the new high water mark of Millennial fiction.”

Adam Hunter

compares it to The Sun Also Rises, declaring the work “one of the great novels of this period.”

ARX-Han

thinks “it’ll stand the test of time as one of the more important and lasting literary novels of this millennial era.” There were a few others that I came across as well, all positive if a little less enthusiastic.

My first thought upon reading these posts was that book reviews tend toward David Foster Wallace¹ at his most insufferable². This isn’t an insult directed at any of the reviewers; it’s an observation of the form’s weakness. If you put a novel in front of the literati, they will start ejaculating lyrical prose onto the ceiling. It’s like feeding the biggest nerd at Carnegie Mellon a delicious algorithms problem: Once he gets the answer, he is guaranteed to slobber it all over your face.

But just because one finds a style displeasing does not mean that the content beneath is poor. The other writers made quite a few discoveries that I’d missed in my laziness. So I stopped drinking beer and read The Sleepers again, all the way through, in a couple of days. Then a friend visited and it was back to drinking, mainly whiskey and tequila this time. And now, here I am, rushing to finish this review because the book came out earlier today, and I was supposed to publish this weeks ago.

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The Sleepers is a serious, ambitious novel full of well-written prose. It follows four main characters, with a focus on their romantic relationships, as they suffer through their lives in New York. Dan is an effeminate, tortured, overly-political professor who is plagued by both his incessant intellect and his animal desires. The latter are directed toward Eliza, his ex-student, who is insecure, conniving, and, above all, immature. The former is directed toward his own weakness as well as his troubled relationship with Mariko, an attractive part-time actress who identifies as a part of the creative class without ever paying its dues or facing its consequences. The last major character is the one the novel starts with, Akari, who, unlike her sister, really is thriving as an artist in LA. She is the most traditionally masculine of the lot, all the way down to her desire for younger women.

The novel’s central conflict (not a spoiler as it’s on the back cover) hinges on two affairs: Dan with Eliza; Mariko with her dying mentor. More interesting than the details of the liaisons are the contradictions latent within them. Every character involved, save Mariko’s ex-director, is a walking inconsistency, just the sort of people one finds in real life. Almost everyone gets away without too much damage, except for Dan, who falls victim to a cultural attack that will be familiar to anyone who has lived through the last few years of omnipresent cancellations. The author skillfully avoids any political invective and instead presents all sides of the case, leaving the reader to make his own judgement on the characters’ fates.

The book is much more focused on the cast’s minds—how they think, feel, and process the smaller moments of life—than it is on dramatic action. One of the novel’s aims is to precisely trace and document the workings of the millennial mind; if it does indeed last, it will be because it serves as a time capsule that depicts the interior life of a generation. Though major problems have vanished for young, somewhat-wealthy Americans—no war, no outhouses, no syphilis (relatively speaking)—we are more empty, more anxious, and more isolated than those who came before us. For a non-millennial, it can be difficult to grasp why this is the case. Rather than explicitly stating the answer to this question, Gasda meticulously reveals the meaninglessness present at the thought-level of the cast’s minds. They look around and see nothing. All of this is here today, gone tomorrow, as they will be too. Living inside of this worldview for 300 pages is unsettling. One feels that the characters could disassociate and drift off into a permanent void at any given moment.

In spite of its lack of plot, the novel moves blazingly fast. During both my readings I wasn’t sure why this was the case, but now I think it’s primarily because Gasda’s clean prose accurately mimics the experience of thinking, which also allows him to get away with more telling than showing. The book changes perspective from chapter to chapter, and by the end of the story the reader has inhabited the minds of different, yet inextricably connected, points-of-view. The author rises to the challenge of this structure because he has a preternatural understanding of each character’s internal experience. Nearly every thought and feeling follow from each other with such verisimilitude that one rarely resists the chain of logic. On notable occasions, however, this immersion is broken. The conversation between the girls in the park feels off. Dan’s confession to Akari and her decision to withhold such damning information from her sister is impossible to believe. Other scenes drag on for too long. But, for the most part, the reader falls into the various characters’ brains and nervous systems with ease; the novelist describes them truthfully, capturing both the content of their thoughts and the language in which they think them:

Suzanne stands up and stretches and looks out the window. She likes Bedstuy… All Suzanne can think about, watching Mariko play with little Olivia, is how ridiculously, stupidly, ordinary, repeatable, universal, and human the scene is… how it’s happened billions of times before, and will happen a billion times in the future. She wonders if this is not the most significant thing: the sameness of people.

She doesn’t really wanna think about it.

Mariko has been crying in the bathroom… Akari doesn’t care though; Akari gives zero fucks. Suzanne thinks Akari is done with her sister, done with the whole saga, done with pity and routinized empathy.

All they do is pick at each other; it’s so passive aggressive. (260)

The spoken dialogue also takes a natural form. It is for this reason, amongst others, that Hunter compares the novel to The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway, to the dismay of Gertrude Stein³, sought to capture how people really spoke. But how accurate was he? If one thinks of dialogue on a spectrum from cinematic to hyper-realistic, TSAR is certainly on one side, but it is still a ways from the end. Its creator worked hard at turning quotidian prose into poetry. Gasda, on the other hand, does none of that. Most of the characters’ words could be copied and pasted from a conversation one overhears on the subway. Placed on the same spectrum, it is at the farthest end of realism.

It has always been incredibly difficult to pull this trick off, but, because colloquial language has regressed dramatically, it is now near impossible. Modern expressions are hideous on the page. Gasda’s diction succeeds both in documenting how millennials speak and in waking the reader up to how awful he himself must sound. But the result is as off-putting as modern speech, and it becomes painful for someone with reasonable aesthetics to traipse through page after page of such ugly dialogue. We might have reached a point culturally where everyone speaks so poorly that—unless an author has a once-in-a-generation sense of humor and gift for voice—there is no way to take this approach without worsening the reader’s experience of the tale. (This is true for movies as well: the lingo in Avatar 2 made me want to throw my iPhone 14 at the screen.) Additionally, Gasda includes too many ineffectual back-and-forths and filler sentences that are faithful to modern language but still should have been cut. If you can’t already tell, this is my biggest gripe with the novel, though I did find sections more palatable during the second pass, especially when there was subtle humor involved:

“Tell me about your childhood.”

“My childhood?” She wasn’t prepared for the question. “It was weird.”

“How so?”

“My family is pretty fucked up,” Eliza said, looking at the pavement.

“Sounds familiar.”

“Yours too?”

“Yup. What’s up with yours?”

“My mom has emotional problems mainly.”

“Mine too—or had—like what?”

“Your mom is dead?”

“Yeah—um—but to my question—”

“Uh—well—she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks on end, over the littlest things; she’s a completely different person around people who aren’t her family. Very charming.” (118)

The written dialogue, comprised mostly of texting, also strives to sound true-to-reality. But, unlike the spoken word which is too accurate, I constantly felt that I was in the presence of something that was attempting, yet failing, to be lifelike. It’s a bit like a Brazilian-American reading a realistic English novel with bits of Portuguese on every other page. But the Portuguese is unlike any Portuguese he has ever heard, all the way down to the accents. Is it pedantic to care about these inaccuracies? I’m not sure. But I am sure that it broke predictably broke my immersion in the narrative, which the author had worked hard to achieve in the first place.

This weakness aside, Gasda’s general approach to technology is commendable. He deftly slips in and out of the analog world into the digital. He illuminates the tremendous vanity beneath small actions we take as standard, like editing selfies and sending them out for the world’s approval. He makes clear the perverse effects that porn has on male minds.

Upon finishing The Sleepers, one starts to think differently about our addiction to the internet. Before the reader thinks that he is caught in a pernicious cycle (i.e. the mind shapes the internet which shapes the mind, ad infinitum) that cannot be broken. But the novel suggests that there is a clear root of the trouble: our spiritual malaise. If nothing really matters, and AI is going to start writing all the great novels, and God is dead, why would I avoid the temptation to jerk off to Instagram reels? Why would I do the hard work of writing when I could play with ChatGPT? Why would I struggle through 1200 pages of Tolstoy when I could scroll TikTok? Why wouldn’t I invite 62 girls off of Hinge to my apartment to “make pasta” before “blowing their backs out?” The confluence of modern cultural values and technology has created generations that are evermore disconnected at every level: from spirituality, from art, from love, from each other, from themselves. Unlike our elders, a concept that doesn’t really exist anymore in the West, we can’t even unite around common conflicts.

Part of the reason for this separation is the American intellect, which Gasda vividly illustrates. It is anxious, depressed, (at least a little) nihilistic, lonely, and quite often vapid. But, more than all else, it is obstructive. None of these characters can quiet their minds; mentally, they never shut up. There are many reasons why Dan and Mariko’s romance fails, but the primary one, in my reading, is that they are trapped in their heads. They have over-complicated every aspect of life to the extent that even sex is political. They are so cerebral that real emotions, save for panic, fail to gain any territory. The reader never even has a sense of their bodies; they’re more like neurons floating through space. In Dan’s case, like many others in New York, this incessant rumination desperately latches onto politics, which allows him to outwardly justify his own misery. The irony here is that the greatest political movements were rooted in the spirit of love, which he no longer has access to.

The author’s exploration of identity is equally strong. By repeatedly referring to characters as their title (e.g. the professor), he elucidates the rigid views they have of themselves, which drive many of their actions. Though it’s never explicitly mentioned, they try to use their attachments to identity to relieve their anxiety. In a fragmented, meaningless world, they need something to grab onto. Since the external force of God is no longer an option, they choose specific images they have of themselves. Though Mariko hardly auditions anymore, she can never quit acting because she depends on the stable form of self the profession provides. Because she sees herself as a “creative,” her affair becomes more permissible, as what could be more poetic than sleeping with a dying artist?

But their clinging to identity is also a source of anxiety. The ego that they are grabbing onto is fragile and prone to change. Akari, Mariko, and Eliza do not face a cataclysm strong enough to disrupt their sense of self. But Dan does. Before that point he’s already plagued by a feeling that, with regards to his politics, morals, and sexuality, he may not be what he proclaims. Then, after the storm comes to break down the structure he so carefully built, he is obliterated. This is what can happen when a person has nothing more than his own ego to believe in, and then it is destroyed.

Though all of this sounds incredibly bleak, I believe Gasda’s book is, at a deeper level, optimistic. He tells us that there is a way out—if we can just break through to the spirit. The novel does not provide a path to accomplishing this feat, but its conversations on the subject of God and its references to the finest concepts of Buddhism may shunt the perceptive reader from tantalizing shiny tracks to more sturdy rusted ones. After inhabiting these minds, which are, to a varying extents, our own, The Sleepers ends with a question: Do you really want to end up like them?

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1. With fewer footnotes.

2. For the record, I really like DFW most of the time but hate him the rest.

3. From A Moveable Feast:

Miss Stein sat on the bed that was on the floor and asked to see the stories I had written and she said that she liked them except one called “Up in Michigan.”

“It’s good,” she said. “That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.”

“But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.”