The Millennial Generation Gets Its "The Sun Also Rises"

A review of Matthew Gasda's "Sleepers"

The Millennial generation has often been derided for our Cooler Than Thou attitude, our refusal to grow up and our supposed lack of motivation. Until Gen Z came along to piss everyone off even more, we were the butt of every joke, constantly under the microscope for being, it seemed, the most annoying generation of all.

And yet, as we’ve grown into middle age, it’s become apparent that there is, as with every generation, a great narrative running through our history. This is recognizable by some of the familiar beats and themes, such as the hellbent obsession with going to college, emphasizing meaning over salary in career selection, and the perpetual postponement of adulthood. Annoying or not, in other words, we have our story to tell, our characters and archetypes, and our own myths and legends about coming of age in 21st century.

Matthew Gasda’s debut novel Sleepers not only covers this terrain, but finds the depth and meaning behind it. It’s the story not just of older Millennials encountering some of the more defining moments of the late ‘10s, but living them as breathing characters. It is, for my money, one of the great novels of this period.

The story is quite simple: a kind Faulkner-esque tale of a group of characters in New York City, each of them undergoing a meaning crisis. They have romantic partners and jobs, dreams and ambitions. But something is always getting in the way, some barrier that prevents them from flourishing. How they navigate the pitfalls of their personal and professional lives, how they interact with and succumb to temptation, is the dramatic locus, and a fascinating one at that.

One of the things Gasda foregrounds about his characters is how each of them embodies a particular role. Characters are sometimes referred to by their job — “the director,” “the professor,” “the actress” — and these jobs have a habit of leaking into inappropriate places, such as when the aforementioned actress feels herself performing for people during moments where vulnerability is required.

For the most part as well, none of these roles have really been actualized, at least not to their fullest potential. Many of these characters, especially Dan, the professor, finds himself facing the sheer phoniness, the facade that he’s built around his professional status. He’s a Marxist professor who’s never contributed anything meaningful to the subject; he has a book contract but doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to write anything. Hell, he isn’t even that well read. And if he’s not that, then what is he?

Adding insult to injury is the fact that none of these characters seem capable of having real connections with one another. More than one of them remarks at some point that they feel a distance between themselves and others, whether through technology (which plays a not-insignificant role) or through an inability to speak the truth. Many of their relations feel like missed opportunities, as if they’re always bumping into familiar faces whose name they can’t place.

It’s in this realm that Gasda does something quite remarkable. For large parts of the book, when we’re interacting with the thoughts of his characters, Gasda continues to use his authorial voice. What this does, is it bounces the inaccessibility of his characters back onto the reader, making them in some sense complicit in the very problem the characters are having.

Let’s start with an example:

She could see the genuine, almost childish fear in his eyes — and she felt immensely guilty, and as a result, resigned herself to not pushing things further than this. He just couldn’t take it. Every time she contrived to trap him, hurt him, she regretted it; he was too easy to hurt, too naive and defenseless — that was his defense. Was he aware of it? (71)

Here, Gasda isn’t dropping us into Mariko’s thoughts — he’s telling us what they are. He’s playing a buffer between us and her, refusing us the intimacy that we are more than likely expecting. What happens therefore is that however much we think we know about these people — and we do feel quite familiar with them by the end — there’s always something missing, something that stands in between us and them.

A more Apollonian critic might quibble with this technique (“SHOW DON’T TELL, GASDA!”), but I will do no such thing. In fact, we might throw another writer’s craft shibboleth in their face, and refer to the agreement between form and content, since that’s what’s happening here. There’s a kind of fractal effect, in other words, where the lack of intimacy between characters is experienced by us as well, which makes this a successful and powerful technique.

Nor is this without precedent. In fact, Gasda is here continuing in the tradition of the great modernists, whose books seem to have had an enormous influence on this one. In particular, Gasda seems to draw on Faulkner’s novels As I Lay Dying and The Sound And The Fury, with each chapter showcasing a different character’s perspective, and a plot that takes place in a very recognizable reality, dipping in and out of the internal and external world.

These influences speak, I would argue, to the sheer ambition present here. Gasda wants to not only deal with realistic characters, he wants to shove them into the grand themes of our time. Like the modernists before him, he wants to show us what the world has done to how we think and perceive each other, what our own ambitions are. And more than that, he wants to show us what it might mean to work within these bounds, and who we might become if we succeed — or fail.

Now, are there some things we could quibble with? Certainly. The first chapter, where Akari arrives in New York, can be clunky at times — especially on the first page, which is unfortunate. There’s a tendency there to slip into her backstory in a very blunt manner that could have been more elegantly woven into the scene. Coming so early in the book too, it gives the impression that perhaps we’re in for a bumpier ride than we actually are.

There’s also a seduction later on that seems to fall over itself in trying to move too quickly. Far be it for me to assume I can correctly diagnose the problem, but this scene — between one character and an old flame — could have been broken into more scenes, to allow the seduction room to play out more naturally. Basically, in the writing craft’s parlance, it felt like an unearned development.

But these are such minor criticisms that to dwell on them would give the impression this is a much more flawed book than it is. In reality, this is a book that manages to bring together many of the themes and obsessions of the Millennial generation, and in a way that never detracts from the essential humanity of those experiencing it. That he does so without moralizing, and in fact acknowledges the sheer messiness of how people interact with, and are affected by, their culture, is to his credit. In this book, there is only the sheer mess of humanity, working through the movements of history, suffering and bringing suffering onto others.

There’s a lot of hype around this work. But if anyone’s been worried about whether or not Gasda nailed it, I believe this worrying should end now. Gasda has written an exceptional and moving novel that brings the contemporary moment to life with a depth and grace that is, at times, downright astonishing.

Other writers should take note: this is the new high water mark of Millennial fiction.