Sleeping Through Life

The Sleepers: A Novel
by matthew gasda
arcade publishing, 273 pages, $27.99

Two chapters into Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, Mariko, a waitress and stage actress, gets into a spat with her boyfriend, Dan, a Marxist English professor and would-be public intellectual. As she chides him for failing “to see things from my perspective,” she spots her phone on the table. “It occurred to her that it would make her feel better, even for perverse reasons. She felt little tremors of pleasure just thinking about it.” Soon, tuning him out, she has picked up the phone and begun to scroll.

As for Dan, he has written “a sociological analysis of the effect of digital communication on personal communication” for the latest issue of n+1. But the internet casts its spell on him, too. His eyes hurt from staring at his MacBook, and he’s so intent on “trying to make himself hot through prestige” that, Mariko thinks, he “had developed an erotic relationship with his readership and his Twitter followers rather than her.” After Mariko has gone to sleep, Dan sneaks out of the house and Ubers to meet Eliza, a former student who reached out via Facebook. 

Mariko and Dan belong to a species of fidgety multitaskers that the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has named Phono sapiens. One of that species’ defining traits is a kind of restless impatience, an inability to sit back and enjoy an art film, say, or to have a deep, uninterrupted conversation with a loved one. (“It had been so long since he just relaxed and read a book for pleasure,” thinks Dan.) The couple’s addiction to on-screen divertissement can be blamed on technology, but it also has deeper causes, such as the eclipse of religious faith. “Most contemporary people . . . don’t experience the time between birth and death in a natural, primal way—especially if they no longer believe in stories of salvation, whether pagan or Christian,” Gasda remarked in his review of Han’s The Crisis of Narration. “Instead they must anxiously distract themselves from death.”  

In The Sleepers, it is Mariko’s younger sister, Akari, an LA-based cinematographer, who grasps this connection between the retreat of transcendence and an incapacity for living fully in human time. Trying and failing not to use Tinder in a Brooklyn bar, she looks around and, in between swipes, wonders: “didn’t anyone realize they were actively dying, that they were hastening the decay process with each mouthful, with the mastication of the food?” Later, she starts thinking about a Kurosawa film she saw back in high school: “She’d had the sense, even then, that it was easy to waste your life, to give it away, to sleep through it. Ikiru had captured this incredible sense of fleetingness, preciousness, fragility. It, life, would all be gone one day—and what would you have to show for it?”

For all her contradictions, Akari is the most alert, the most awake, of the characters in The Sleepers. Not only is she attuned to such fleeting details as a passing face in a car window or the “stupidly, pointlessly sweet” taste of agave in her coffee (nobody in this novel would dream of ingesting sugar or cow’s milk), but she also recognizes the limits of the hedonic treadmill, even if she enjoys being on it. Reflecting on her tidy apartment, many sexual conquests (both male and female), and great career, she acknowledges: “There was no holiness, nothing sacred, in all those little fragments of comfort and pleasure.” The other female characters “journal,” have long phone calls with their therapists, and say things like: “I just really want to be vulnerable with someone.” The spiritual grammar of Kurosawa’s film has given Akari an approach to the world that doesn’t default to the usual therapeutic clichés. 

You might think that Dan, a professor in daily contact with the wisdom of the great nineteenth-century novels, could find his own way to cultivating wonder at life’s fragile beauty. “Great writing was never really nihilistic,” he reflects, observing that the characters in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have in common “the willingness to search for God.” But this promising train of thought is soon engulfed by nicotine cravings and little spasms of guilt and dread. Intergenerational trauma is partly to blame: His mother committed suicide. But the source of his self-loathing lies deeper: “He had rejected himself around the age of thirteen and never really reevaluated his opinion.” Split off from any sense of (as Akari thinks) “how deeply miraculous it is just to exist at all, even for a few minutes, a day, on earth, as a human being,” he lives on the surface, engaging in contorted attempts to wrest recognition from his students and followers. 

Although he has published works of fiction before this one, the world knows Matthew Gasda mostly as a playwright. His breakout hit Dimes Square, which recently closed a run at The Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, captured—and to some degree conjured—a neighborhood and a cultural moment. In its deference to the Aristotelian unities, frank naturalism, and ear for talky dialogue, The Sleepers bears the stamp of Gasda’s background in the theater, even verging on becoming a closet drama in some scenes. But it also takes us into its characters’ inner life, rendering the full gamut of their experience, from the tug of basic urges to lofty reflections on death and truth. 

What The Sleepers is not is a searing indictment of internet culture or a merciless satire of very online Millennials. Akari admires Dan’s skill as a writer but finds his n+1 article “too deft”: “the piece was cool, inventive, witty, but ultimately, destined to become part of the internet culture that the piece itself claimed to abhor.” The Sleepers avoids that trap. Instead of setting out to mock internet culture, the novel accepts it as part of contemporary life, its irony arising from relatable moments of human weakness presented without heavy-handed comment.

This quiet acceptance of life (and death) makes the book itself a salve for the anxious swiping and scrolling it so meticulously recreates. Immersing yourself in it makes you notice little things—your own verbal tics and texting style (lower case? punctuation or no?), the rings in your coffee cup, even the subtle fault lines in your relationships. It wakes you up to the world, which is no small achievement.