On Matthew Gasda’s ‘The Sleepers’
Stephen G. Adubato | May 21, 2025
(RealClearWire) — During the height of the pandemic, the Spanish priest Julian Carron published a book posing the simple yet loaded question: “Is there hope?” “The pandemic,” he posited, offered “a propitious opportunity for the verification” of the answer to this question—which “is the most widespread and challenging one in this time dominated by uncertainty…In fact,” he continued, “we are witnessing a full-blown clash between being and nothingness: a unique combat because of its import and dimensions, with a more visible part constantly covered by the mass media…and a more hidden and personal part with its aspects of fear, solitude, fragility.”
In the face of nothingness—of the fleetingness of beauty and love, of our restlessness and our perpetually fucking things and relationships up—we can seek out further distractions, keep on doomscrolling, chasing after new achievements and moral causes to champion, pursuing flings and adventures, in an attempt (futile as it may be) to stave off the return of that haunting dread. Or we can look at the nothingness for what it is—choosing either to revel in it and “seize the day,” or to ask if there is something or someone capable of filling this abyss with a lasting sense of meaning. Carron points to Albert Camus and Saint Augustine as the two archetypal representatives of these latter two options.
Unlike less glamorous existentialists like Sartre, Camus was lauded for his ostentatious, haughty celebration of life’s absurdity. He came to epitomize the cool, deep-thinking urban elite who—very much satisfied with his edgy, countercultural hot takes—believes himself, put frankly, to be hot shit. Yet how satisfying can this embrace of the absurd really prove to be in the long run? Judging by the elite New York millennials featured in Matthew Gasda’s latest novel The Sleepers, not all that much. Gasda’s disarmingly perceptive portrayal of the notorious intellectual/artist types who have come to infiltrate broad swaths of Brooklyn brings to life the question posed by Carron, finding themselves trapped between Camus’ flagrant excitement in the face of nothingness and Augustine’s earnest search for hope from within its trenches.
The admission by one character that “dying is absurd, as absurd as life,” is more a lament than a bold proclamation. And while none of the characters fully abandon the spark of desire for hope, the snares of millennial psychological dysfunction seem to sap them of the energy to seek it out. One character wonders “what can redeem us from the darkness,” to which the other responds, “why—nothing at all…in the long run.” “Sometimes…” she admits, “I think—gee, it would be nice to believe in God, but I just have no capacity for faith whatsoever.” Gasda’s painstakingly psychoanalytic depiction of characters caught in this limbo is as aggravating as it is scintillating to read. Put simply, Gasda’s capacity to open a window to the pathetic neuroses that plague New York’s younger elites is nothing short of prophetic.
Dan and Mariko are a Brooklyn-dwelling unmarried couple in their thirties—the former a deeply insecure untenured academic and overly idealistic political blogger, the latter an equally insecure yet masterfully manipulative actress struggling to find work. Dan finds himself conflicted by how his wounds from past trauma incline him to act embarrassingly immaturely in relationships, and by his lofty, utopian ideals as a progressive writer and academic. And as much as Mariko demonstrates her disturbing ability to jab and twist knives into her boyfriend’s wounds, her own neediness keeps her from leaving him, opting to remain caught in the dismally enmeshed matrix that is their relationship.
The argument between the two of them that incites the main conflict of the plot is horrifically grating—demonstrating Gasda’s masterful ability to unveil the dark crevices within the millennial psyche. In the aftermath of the argument, a self-pitying and horny Dan receives a DM from a student who makes it clear from the get-go that she’s DTF, successfully luring him into her seductive snares and turning his relationship—and his whole life—upside down. He shamefully intersperses his attempts to justify the un-Title IX-worthy fling with diatribes against the dehumanizing atrocities of the capitalist machine—seeming to be totally blind to his inability to take any accountability for his actions.
The dysfunctional relationships featured throughout the novel are haunted by the shadow of past psychological trauma almost as much as they are by the fear of the transactional nature of human interactions in current-day New York City, and further by the looming terror of the finitude of existence. Mariko searches for “the moral core that would justify her time spent” with Dan, but comes up dry. Dan bemoans having “no meaningful connections with anyone in this city.” Eliza complains that true friendship “always seemed to evade” her, as “she worried that she was incapable of bypassing the small differences of habit and temperament that mediated her experience of others…and that consequently, she would never have that warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded with care.” She later admits that her life primarily consisted of “drink, hangout, fuck around. New York only sped up the rate at which her centrifuge spun; the city was a sadness generator.” Mariko’s sister Akari wonders if it is possible to lust after Suzanne, her lesbian partner, “without seeing her as a good to be consumed,” and fears that “the entirety of Suzanne’s affections was an attempt to gain connections.”
The characters’ fear of the ephemeral is exacerbated by their attachment to screens. Gasda, who is notorious for his countercultural disavowal of smartphones in favor of flip phones, continuously alludes to the tendency of the algorithms behind the apps to which his characters are hooked to condition their brains to treat others like mere dopamine stimulators. Eliza and her friends’ decision to attend a party they were invited to by random guys in the park “was an extension of Instagram-thinking: it was (and this was truly bizarre) like they were being ‘liked’ in real life…the Internet softened them up to being hit on.” Dan finds himself perturbed by how Eliza “just logged onto an app and hacked into [his] brain.” Akari finds that Tinder had “become a crutch” for her, restructuring her time and space.
Gasda juxtaposes the misery of New York’s upwardly mobile, culturally rootless, and spiritually underfed youth with the city’s “back row” residents, many of whom—despite lacking (and often supplying) the comforts and conveniences enjoyed by those in the front row—manage to muster up some gratitude for the gift of existence. While rummaging through the fridge, Mariko begrudgingly goes for a half-eaten cup of vegan, ethically-sourced cashew yogurt which “tasted like shit,” but at least “it was better than straight-up carbs.” And while doomscrolling in the park, Eliza glances over to see a group of hispanic guys “cheering wildly” for their friend who hit a homerun while playing baseball, remarking that “it didn’t seem possible for a human being to be happier than this guy.”
Gasda’s prophetic prose is a wake-up call to bourgeois coastal elites to examine our self-indulgent choices, our performative politics, and our resistance to seeking out true meaning in life and to building up a foundational bulwark to sustain ourselves and our posterity. His remarkable ability to scrutinize the moral conscience and microanalyze the psyche of his peers make up the novel’s strengths, as well as its weaknesses.
His critique of millennial coastal elites—especially of leftist academic/blogger types—resists affording them any grace. Gasda, for instance, allows Dan to get mercilessly dragged—making him a punching bag of sorts for the other characters. The unambiguously critical tone through which Gasda presents his characters’ political (and emotional) proclivities will likely make it difficult for those who don’t already agree with him to take the important questions embedded within his critique seriously.
Later on in his book, Carron draws upon the prophetic tradition to find the answer to the search for some kind of hope that can save us from the nothingness so many of us are plagued by. “With age-old love I have loved you,” Yahweh tells Jeremiah, “having compassion on your nothingness.” It is precisely through the kind of relationship where I am looked at as I truly am: not as a mere object to be used or as a fleeting source of passion, nor as an algorithmic manifestation to be “liked” or swiped left or right at, not as someone you reluctantly pencil in time to see and then flippantly cancel on last minute, but as a gift…mired perhaps by my many flaws and wounds, but nevertheless, as a gift worth valuing through the ages. And it is precisely through sharing our nothingness and—as Dorothy Day would put it, entering into the other’s “long loneliness”—that divine hope can reveal itself.
Gasda’s novel poignantly encapsulates the desert of loneliness—where few people really care to look at you, to receive you in the entirety of who you are—that so many young New Yorker’s feel themselves to be stranded in. But whether he manages to point those listening to some form of transcendence—as did the prophets of yore—is left to be determined by the reader, and perhaps also by Gasda himself. The characters’ inability to find the hope they long for, and their refusal to—like Camus—relish in life’s absurdity, leaves us to wonder what would happen if we actually did risk demanding—like Augustine—that hope come down from on high and reveal itself to us.
Camus’ fascination with Augustinian theology—which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation—provokes us to ask how much he truly bought his own optimistic form of nihilism. He writes that for Augustine, “the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh was not through intellectual escapism, but through a full awareness of his depravity and his misery….Humankind as a whole is doomed to the flames. Its only hope is divine mercy.” Gasda’s own solution to the problem with which he confronts his readers remains unclear, yet his novel provokes us to dare to keep hope alive.
Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine.
This article was originally published by RealClearBooks and made to available to WMAL via RealClearWire.
