Literary Prozac
Matthew Gasda’s new novel unfolds in a haze of empty dialogue and overwrought introspection.
A review of The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda, 288 pages, Arcade Publishing (May 2025)
In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s not feelings of personal injury and past trauma that we mine for poetic inspiration, it’s the archives of the canon. The artist becomes a vessel for tradition, synthesising pre-existing forms into something new. In so doing, the artist removes any trace of himself—or at least any trace that critics should concern themselves with. Eliot had more than an academic interest in separating the personal from the poetry—his private life was famously troubled, not least by his institutionalisation of his wife. But we need not adopt his coldblooded formalism to recognise the value of cultivating a “historical sense.” Without it, we are confined to the material of our own lives and the preoccupations of the present.
This is the territory staked out by Matthew Gasda, a New York playwright and novelist. In a recent article for UnHerd, he argues that novels “need a past; they need genealogies, textures, roots—even if they’re set, roughly, now.” The problem with a lot of contemporary fiction, he continues, is that it is rootless: “detached from history and philosophy, stuck, like an algorithm scroll, in the meaningless present.” Much of what passes for cultural production today is drawn from the same “mode of speech, system of ideas, style of discourse” of the technologically homogenised urban monoculture. The contemporary novelist’s task, Gasda insists, is to “bundle the data of reality” in ways other than how social media does. Novels should be more than the literary equivalent of online memes, social-media activism, and therapeutic self-diagnosis. “If novelists stop taking us away from the pathologies of the present,” Gasda asks, “then what are they up to?”
These are strong words from Gasda, who as a critic, may have dug his own grave as a practitioner. In his fictional worlds, characters chatter and nothing happens; everyone hates their partner, their friends, and is sleeping with their friend’s partner (whom they also hate). As a reviewer of Gasda’s pandemic-era breakthrough work Dimes Square puts it:
The play’s dramatis personae—twenty-something musicians, artists, filmmakers, fashionistas, and think-piece churners who gather in an artsy Chinatown apartment to do drugs, rounded out by a pair of middle-aged hangers-on from the city’s literary scene—certainly share a fatalistic mentality. Here is a group of people whose little corner of the world threatens at any moment to sink irrevocably into the mire of corporate pseudo-creativity, influencer homogeneity, and podcasted drivel.
In Gasda’s new novel The Sleepers, the cast is unchanged, only slightly older. The central emotional conceit involves the toxic push-pull between Dan, a failing Marxist academic nearing forty, and Mariko, a 32-year-old actress whose ambitions have faded along with her looks. Though their arcs are slightly more than straight lines, the dynamic is sustained at a monotonous emotional pitch of near-collapse, punctuated by the odd dopamine rush of overstimulation. Dan and Mariko “couldn’t exist without the tension of possible catastrophe,” and in every scene, neither knows how much longer they can “go on like this”—which, across 300 pages, makes you wish they wouldn’t.
Like Gasda’s DIY stage work, The Sleepers is sparsely furnished. Realism is conjured through trivial dialogue and fleeting thoughts. “The cashew yogurt tasted like shit, but it was better than straight-up carbs. Was there honey in the cabinet?” Mariko wonders. Later, after pulling down her pants to urinate, she flushes “with her toes.” These details rarely contribute to our understanding of either character or story, and this realism-without-substance approach creates a novelistic texture akin to doomscrolling; you read something irrelevant, distasteful, or both before quickly moving on and forgetting it.
The entire novel unfolds in a haze of empty dialogue and overwrought introspection. Gasda leans heavily on ponderous exposition and vague psychoanalytic jargon to explain his characters. Dan realises that he wants to date teenagers—a desire apparently “rooted in his own creative-intellectual despair”—but that he also wants Mariko to be his “sexualized mother.” Women, we’re told, hide the smell of their own faeces—a “semi-mystical, totally illogical” fact somehow attributable to “repression.”
Gasda delivers generalisations like these in a third-person free indirect style that blurs thought and narration, resulting in aphorisms that may belong to his characters or to Gasda himself:
 |
|