If your book has shallow, lifeless characters, you've got to work twice as hard to make them interesting

Last year I spent an enjoyable week reading several of Christopher Lasch’s books. Lasch was a late 20th-century history professor best known for his 1979 polemic The Culture of Narcissism. His theory was that because society has become so permissive, contemporary Americans have an underdeveloped superego. They lack a voice telling them that certain things are right or wrong. And since the ego develops in response to the conflicting demands of the id and superego, this means that peoples’ egos are underdeveloped as well.

As a result, people don’t have a strong sense of self, and they tend to be highly influenced by whatever people around them seem to be doing. They also tend to feel a lot of anxiety, self-hatred, and lack of direction. Peoples’ main concern is to project a sense of self, but when this projection is challenged, they tend to respond in a very volatile, off-balance way.

I enjoyed reading these books, but at the time I remarked that it all seemed a bit much. The books work by playing on the reader’s sense of superiority: you consume these books, and come away feeling great because you know you’re so much better than the helpless saps depicted therein.

As I wrote at the time, I do not feel myself to lack values or to lack a sense of self, and I imagine that most of you, my readers, feel the same. Anyone who reads a Great Books blog tends to think that they’re in touch with some kind of timeless, enduring values.

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I thought of Lasch when reading Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, which reads like a book-length dramatization of Lasch’s ideas.

This novel is about aspiring actress, Mariko, and her boyfriend, Dan, who is a tenure-track professor and political blogger (he’s basically an n+1 guy). Mariko is thirty-two, and Dan is approaching forty, and this couple is adrift. In Mariko’s case, the reason is obvious: she hasn’t booked many acting gigs, and she’s aging. Dan has stopped having sex with her, and as a result she’s very insecure about her looks. For Dan, the source of his angst is less clear. There is trauma related to his mom’s suicide—there’s an implication that he’s insecurely-attached and unable to truly connect with anyone. Moreover, he holds his liberal-progressive values so cheaply that perhaps there’s nothing to him—perhaps there’s not really a Dan to connect with.

Dan embarks on a flirtation with a former student of his, Eliza. She quickly realizes that he is pathetic and starts to pull away, but at the same time she is desperate to assert her own attractiveness and to have the kinds of sexual adventures she associates with being young and living in New York City.

Mariko also has a sister, Akari, who features in some of the chapters, but doesn’t play a strong role in the action of the story. She’s essentially a foil for Mariko, in that Akari is somewhat more content and self-realized. A similar foil exists for Dan—an older director named Xavier who appears in one chapter.

I was excited to read this novel, as I had previously enjoyed a volume of Gasda’s plays, Dimes Square And Other Plays. His plays have a lot of energy. The titular play is about a circle of artists, writers, filmmakers, and about their envy, loathing, social-climbing and doubts. Many of the play’s scenes revolve around peoples’ reactions to Terry, a member of their circle who has “made it” (i.e. just released a well-received film). You can feel the other characters bristling with longing and tension whenever they talk with Terry.

IRIS What’s it called again Terry? 
TERRY ‘The Work of Fire’. 
TERRY Yeah, well. 
OLIVIA I was at the Q & A the other night—
TERRY Hope you enjoyed it. 
OLIVIA I did. 
NATE It’s good Terry. 
TERRY Thank you. 
IRIS How do you feel about all the attention? 
TERRY It’s stupid. 
STEFAN Ashley is an actress. 
TERRY That’s cool. 
STEFAN She’s talented as fuck.

The dialogue in the play is aimless and meandering, but there’s something underneath it: the characters’ desperate desire to be recognized. I did not feel like the characters in this play were empty shells: I thought there was something quite appealing about how deeply they wanted to succeed and to be recognized as great talents, even if they sometimes realized that actually their abilities weren’t necessarily there.

The characters in Dimes Square also didn’t fully understand each other. For instance, Terry only vaguely realizes the extent to which other people hate and envy him. He senses it, but not enough to fully discount everything they say. He is still hanging out with these people for a reason, because they are his friends and his community, and he's hoping to connect with them.

Those two things, the sense of longing and the lack of full mutual understanding, are what power the play and make it great.

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The Sleepers, in contrast, operates in a very different world. The novel is told in a strong, omniscient voice that’s capable of rendering judgements on all the characters. I really enjoyed this voice:

She was destined to fall into the massive pool of young people who were artistic, but not really artists—intellectual, but not really intellectuals. That was scary. Was it even avoidable? It seemed culturally determined, structurally determined. She could ask Dan what he thought.

The problem with this voice is that it’s not just the voice of the narrators, it also seems to be the internal voice of all the characters. It’s like there’s a group-mind, and every character is thinking in the same way, about the same topics, coming to the same judgements.

And these characters often act on the basis of that perfect understanding they possess of each others’ internal states. For instance, in this scene of Dan and Eliza on the sidewalk:

Dan looked down at the sidewalk. He didn’t want her to look at him. It was a matter of protecting himself from her inquiring green eyes. He wasn’t used to being looked at this way. He had grown so deft at hiding his emotions from Mariko.

The tidal exhalation of feeling from Dan was so great that Eliza stopped abruptly and kissed him. Then they continued to walk east along Houston.

Dan is feeling strong emotions that he is trying to hide from Eliza, but the strength of those emotions causes her to kiss him.

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Similarly, in many of Mariko’s passages, it’s unclear whether we’re seeing her thoughts or the judgements of an omniscient narrator:

Mariko had never really learned how to fuck: how to abandon all the higher, critical, self-aware functions of consciousness. She’d only ever had the kind of sex that was about other people feeling good about themselves, the kind of sex that people had out of secret contempt. Some part of her clung to control, to pseudo-rationality, to convention, and structure. Her relationship was designed to keep chaos out—and, in that sense, it served its function very well.

Usually I would say that this is the narrator’s assessment of Mariko, but in a later passage in the same chapter, Mariko tries to talk to Dan about their sexlessness, and he responds defensively, which leads to the following passage in narration:

There was so much defensiveness, even potential violence, in his rhetorical question; he, in fact, didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to know “about what.” He didn’t want to have this conversation, that was apparent. He wanted her to feel naive for asking, for proposing a dialogue at this time of night. He wanted her to feel like a fucking child.

In this case it seems clear from the snatch of free indirect narration that’s in Mariko’s voice (“a fucking child”) that we’re in Mariko’s point of view, and she’s imagining what’s going through Dan’s head. But it’s also just very clear from the resulting scene that this is exactly what he’s thinking. The two of them are in perfect harmony; they fully understand each others’ desires and positions.

As a result of this complete understanding that exists between Dan / Eliza and Dan / Mariko, the dialogue tends to take on a very stilted quality. It’s extremely on the nose: every conversation has some purpose, and they talk exactly to the point. For instance, here’s the discussion they have about the fact that they’re not sleeping together anymore:

“I’m embarrassed that I don’t want to sleep with you more, Mariko.” 
“I’m embarrassed for you too.” 
“I know it hurts you.” 
“It doesn’t hurt me,” she said, angrily. “It confuses me.” 
“It hurts—” 
“I’m hot, so you should want to.” 
“I know I should.”
“But you can see why I worry that I’m not hot enough or that I’m losing my hotness.”

In other words, it is missing that veiled, covert quality that we can see in the dialogue in the play Dimes Square. And almost all of the dialogue is like this. For instance, when Eliza and Dan meet at a bar, they have this exchange.

“I didn’t think you’d be so moralistic."
“What’dya mean moralistic?”
“Like: I can tell you’re judging yourself for being in this situation. And me, obviously. For putting you in it.”
“Yeah, okay I’ll admit it. It’s hard to escape those kinds of judgements.”
“Why is it hard?”
"Um,” Dan chuckled from nervous excitement, “because because because—that’s the box I live in.”
She was in control of the situation. “I thought smart literary people want to deconstruct those moral boxes.”

Ultimately, the problem with the book is that these relationships don’t have enough charge to sustain a full novel. I understand that this is the intention of the book. These characters are the titular sleepers. As Lasch would put it, these characters have only a “minimal self”. They understand each other perfectly because they are the same. Their lives seem empty and perfunctory because they have no sense of values, nothing to anchor them.

I know that Matthew Gasda is capable of more. I know he’s capable of drawing characters who are more human and who seem to have more going on. With this book, I accept that wasn’t his aim, but I also think the book could’ve aimed higher.

My opinion here isn’t because of some abstract issue that I had with the book’s style or construction, but because of the very real difficulty that I had in getting through it—after about the halfway point, I stopped expecting the book to surprise me, and as a result my interest in the book lagged considerably. I eventually finished, but it took a whole week.

I can’t help thinking that the book could’ve had more respect for the reader’s time. The critiques raised by The Sleepers are critiques we’ve heard before—they’re quite old, going all the way back to Riesman’s 1950 work of sociology, The Lonely Crowd. Even if you haven’t read Lasch or Riesman, you’re likely familiar with idea that the structure of modern society can give rise to a rote, empty existence. That idea can be the starting point for a book, but there’s got to be some hook, some variation on the theme, something to distract us from the fact that the whole point of the book is that these characters’ thoughts and actions are inherently uninteresting.

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Other Takes

This is the first book I’ve reviewed that’s been extensively Substacked, and I thought it’d be fun to link to other reviews:

• Adam Hunter says this novel is to the Millennial generation what The Sun Also Rises was to the Lost Generation:

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

• Philip Traylen recommends it:

  “This book is very good — everyone should read it.

• Aaron Lake Smith liked it:

  …put alongside much of the tripe of the last seven years, The Sleepers stands out. I think it's an accomplishment. I think it will age well. Gasda's a playwright, used to working with human material, so the dialogue is excellent, the prose is very good.

• Arx-Han raved about it:

  As millennials continue to age terribly, The Sleepers will increasingly read like a coda to the dead-end of our cumulative cultural mores: an incredibly damning indictment of our hedonism and the hollowed-out playground of modern liberalism in the meaning shredder of New York City.

• Ella Schmidt delivered a positive verdict, singling out the characterizations:

  What I admire most are the ways Gasda’s novel seems to break from the fixation on generational distinctions, instead exploring the shared afflictions of disillusionment, aging, and dwindling faith…[The characters] are tender and manipulative, generous and insistently selfish. They are obsessed with sex and themselves, obsessed with time passing and being or not being taken seriously, being or not being loved.

• Sam Buntz found value in the book’s portrayal of a certain kind of somnambulistic existence:

  Gasda’s novel is excellently observed, and what he observes is life-in-death, a kind of somnambulism—hence the title. Paraphrasing Radiohead, these characters aren’t living, they’re just killing time. And they kill time to ultimately destructive effect.

• John Pistelli’s review has a typically expansive and generous reading of the book;

  The problem for this largely anti-tech novel is this: the machines to which we have surrendered ourselves work so effectively on us because they are precisely calibrated to answer the desires of the animal we are. Nature offers no liberation from technology since they are in perfect tandem

• Michael Patrick Brady felt the book was somewhat slight:

  While I enjoyed it more than I expected, I wasn’t in love with the fundamental premise…Ultimately, I think this aspect of the book may be too provincial—hyper specific to contemporary New York bohemians or particular to the kind of Substack writer who is preoccupied with the perceived lack of white male or “non-woke” (whatever that means) literary authors. In that context maybe it does resemble some form of local “truth.” But I’m not in either of those groups, so I don’t find it all that interesting. In that respect, The Sleepers is a bit like a fragment of an overheard conversation: fun to eavesdrop on from a safe distance, but ultimately something that I’m not a part of and probably shouldn’t try too hard to involve myself in.

• Lillian Wang Selonick was circumspect in her opinions, but seems to have been somewhat bored by the characters:

  Perhaps there’s some bravery in depicting Eliza, the young former student, as having a turbulent sort of confidence and agency in initiating the encounter with Dan. But Dan is too pathetic to hold our respect. Mariko is hypocritical, repressed, and cruel. Xavier is pompous and smug. Akari is an irresponsible brat. If the book were an Am I the Asshole thread on Reddit, the verdict would be: Everyone Sucks Here.

• Anthony Marigold’s review is positive, overall, but he goes to some lengths to convince us that the dialogue is bad because it is so accurate (I am unconvinced):

  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 so off-putting that it becomes painful for someone with reasonable aesthetics to traipse through page after page of such ugly dialogue.

• Stuart Ross, writing for The Metropolitan Review, wished the book was a bit more ambitious

  I detected anxiety in the novel’s authorial and narrative distance. Sometimes the point of view feels unsure of itself. Sparse dialogue tagging blurs speakers together, as if all sad Brooklynites share the same voice. That obliquity is part of the novel’s design. But I could come away from a reading period thinking the narrator felt there was little to learn about his own people.

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Send me links to your reviews!

In a previous post, I issued a standing invitation: if you write a Substack post about any book I’ve covered in the last two months, I’ll link to it. Emily at

Good Neighbor Book Club

took me up on the offer by posting about Ted Chiang:

It is refreshing to read science-fiction concepts packed into short stories; it promises both breathing room, from the heady stories and concepts within each Chiang story, and expansiveness. You as the reader are left with the wondrous “What if? What if” that the novel form often drowns just by fulfilling its premise.

I think in the last two months I’ve written about Ted Chiang, Woodworking, The Trauma Plot, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, The Mahabharata, and (now) The Sleepers. So if you end up writing about any of these books or authors, please let me know!

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