Akari has arrived at a particularly tough moment in Mariko and Dan’s relationship. The cinematographer has just arrived at her sister’s place in New York to crash on their couch after a particularly long conversation in the middle of the night about sex, literature, and their future. It only gets more tense from there; as the three interact (but mostly worry about each other), they can feel their identities and plans dissolve. Days before the 2016 election, the three Millennials, along with other artists and theater directors, revolve around the loss of an unlived life, unsure if it’s still within reach.
Our Culture spoke with Matthew Gasda about generational fiction, playwriting, and plundering from diaries.
Congratulations on your debut novel! You’ve written so many plays; did you approach the book the same way?
I started writing the book in 2017, so in many ways it predates many of the plays I’ve become known for. In other ways, it postdates them, because I rewrote a lot of the book in the 2020s. I don’t think there’s a linear relationship to my playwriting. When I moved to New York at 22 I had no idea I’d be writing plays; I exclusively conceived of myself as a novelist or a literary person. I had no foot whatsoever in theater, until I was 24 or 25. In a way, the book is tied to my ambitions I moved to New York with, 14 years ago. It was always my ambition to write generationally relevant New York novels, like so many other people, and at some point it materialized. Obviously, people who have written about The Sleepers so far have commented on the play-like aspects of the book — I think that’s somewhat overrated in the sense that if they didn’t know I was a playwright, I don’t know if it’d get brought up. It might be the case that my fictional dialogue always worked like this, and it translated into theater. For readers, they may assume the opposite — this is me translating into fiction. So there’s some relationship between drama and fiction that’s ongoing, there’s no chicken or egg.
Yeah, I was going to ask if this was originally going to be conceived as a play.
I don’t think so. I think in my head, the shadow realm of my brain is the same. I think the only difference is when I’m writing a play specifically I really think about the third thing, which is the audience. There’s a different mental anticipation of the thing you’re writing. You’re thinking of things like stage time, do they have to pee, where do you put the intermission. There are practical considerations with a play, whereas with fiction, there’s a limitlessness, greater freedom to go into a discursive tangent.
You mention trying for the novel to be generationally relevant — I’m curious why you set it in 2016, days before the election?
I think I had a sense that 2015 was the end of a certain structure of living. It was the end of the socialist hipster era. I saw the character Dan in the novel as a tragic moment, not politically, but culturally and morally, there was a peak naivete, peak blindness. There were massive cultural transformations that even by 2017 were already underway. There’s not a big shift in how the world looks, but I think there’s a massive shift in how people react and think, articulate themselves, have sex.
I love the unease in Mariko and Dan’s relationship, and you write, “It was like they couldn’t exist without the tension of possible catastrophe.” What was it like developing them?
It’s funny, reflecting on something that took ten years. I’ve sort of lost touch… I was writing at such radically different periods, at one point I was a high school teacher, or writing on the subway, going to a job I really loathed, living with someone. The first draft has this extreme feeling of stuckness that reflects my own state and self-loathing. I think I began the book at a time where I felt morally, economically, spiritually disjointed. I didn’t like 2017, I didn’t like the 2010s. I think I was starting to realize it felt bad. In a way, Dan and Mariko became mutilated versions of my own psyche, the academic writer and the theater person, both of whom feel lost. The difference is that I was hyper aware of myself at the time, so there was a kind of beauty and relief in writing these characters who forestall their own realizations. They aren’t fully aware of themselves as failed, whereas at the time I felt very failed. My fantasy in a weird way was to be like them.
I love taking a part of me, either good or bad, and really expanding on it fictitiously through a character.
Yeah, I do believe in the alternate self theory of fiction. I tell people, when I write plays, these are versions of myself that I don’t want to have happen, paths I don’t want to go down. There’s a therapeutic element to seeing your own vulnerabilities and egotisms and desires. I wasn’t a 40-year-old male feminist socialist like Dan, I was 29. I could see how that person was relatively easy to become. Any New Yorker could become Dan. Writing the book was like a ritual to ward off Dan in myself before it was too late.
Speaking of, Dan is a writer who has a book under contract with Verso, and he writes pseudo-philosophical ideas about “the collectivization of opinion” or “the algorithmization of consensus.” I’m wondering if you think he’s pretentious, or earnestly attempting to figure out American society.
Some of those things I took from my own blog in 2015; some of the most uninteresting. That was my way of creating a hybrid — the way to create earnestness was to actually put in some of my own earnest thoughts. I think he’s incredibly earnest. The level at which he’s operating, he fully believes the things he’s doing. The book talks a lot about levels of consciousness, the biological level, material level, social level, erotic level. Dan is someone who is unable to integrate his different drives and modes of awareness; he’s hyperintellectual but unable to integrate that within his own choices.
Dan has an affair with Eliza, and although it’s pretty mundane, both are irreparably changed from it. What did you want their actions to introduce in their lives?
I think it’s as simple as introducing them to themselves. My theory of the book is that if these characters are not fully aware of who they are when the book begins, if they’re both trapped in this sort of daily sameness, they’re both staring down the rest of their lives and they’re not happy with that. There’s a world where they don’t act out their drives or needs. Maybe life’s about settling for someone you don’t get along with. Dan talks about being nostalgic, how nice it is just to have somebody. So the affairs show them they’re not able to compromise, they’re vulgar materialists, libidinal in ways that don’t allow them to acquiesce to the ordinariness of their lives and just accept it. It just returns them to who they always were.
Mariko’s sister, Akari, is just a viewer from LA who is witness to the destruction. Do you think she’s able to view the couple without all the layers of story, or does she not have all of the information?
She knows. I don’t think she needs all the information. As a cinematographer, she’s an observer, kind of passively capturing what’s around her, in a sense, to edit later. She intuits the affair, she doesn’t know the details, but she sees Dan and Mariko both come in, and she clocks it. To me, Akari is someone who’s got a good life. If you want to look at it like a tragedy, she’s the one who could stop the tragedy from unfolding, but she refuses to confront anyone, she’s hung up on her own relationship and career, so she doesn’t want to get involved. She’s sort of the social Darwinist of the group.
I liked that you included some contemporary ideas, mirroring your work for UnHerd, like when you write, “I’m beginning to understand what an artist’s life means… It means giving up this fucking bizarre American obsession with happiness.” Do you as a writer agree?
[Laughs] Yeah. I don’t think you should consciously try to be unhappy, but so many people want to live the Carroll Gardens, Brooklynite novelist lifestyle, write for The New Yorker four times a year, teach at Brooklyn College. I think certain writers get grandfathered into a way of life where you can do that, sell a book or two, enough to buy an apartment. I think the early 2000s in general had de-romanticized the idea of sacrifice or suffering for art. That got left in the 90s. A lot of 90s plots are driven by the idea of the sellout vs the slacker, and I think that just goes away, in my generation, definitely by your generation. There’s no difference between commerce and art. Culturally, no difference. But there is a reality in which you have to offend or reject or push away. Everyone can’t like you, you can’t be happy all the time and be a great artist. I just don’t see how that’s possible. You can’t be a people pleaser or de-libidinal. Real people do real things. We have subjects and genitals and class positions and bodies that are tall or short or fat or ugly or hot. There’s an NPR voice for novelists that really annoy me, where they all sound like the same person. It’s all very nice and pleasant; it’s what I grew up thinking novelists would be.
I also liked this quote: “That was what the internet did to people: it destroyed their indigenous interiority, left them vulnerable to external representations of the self.” I feel like in 2016, when you set the novel, was when people really started to understand this kind of thing and think more deeply about it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, from 2011. When I first moved to New York, I couldn’t afford to buy a book so I’d go to Barnes & Noble and read it in one or two sessions. Someone like him has been worried about that, or George Steiner or Harold Bloom in the 80s and 90s. It’s amazing how often this thought gets iterated. Harold Bloom was interested in the loss of interiority. I guess he was right, but there’s also levels of hell. Broadly speaking, yes, 2016, 2012 — there were these flashpoints where we get further and further away from the inner self and more into these buzzing, external, roboticized… I guess one of my aphorisms is that the threat isn’t just AI becoming more like us but us becoming more like AI. There’s some conversions there.
I wanted to talk about your Writer’s Diary and what a day in the life is like — what things go here, in a book, in a play, in a journal. Where’s the boundary?
It used to be the case where I borrowed immensely from the diary for other things. Sleepers borrowed a lot from my old Medium, in which I wrote a lot of good things, but there’s also a normal, scared liberal voice in the original diaries that I eventually turned against and turned into Dan. But there was also a lot of great writing in fragments that I thought were great sentences. Obviously when the diaries are public they become sort of an archaeological record of your own. I think I was more poetic and intuitive ten years ago, mentally more agile. But I had a much more generic, New York Times-mediated social consciousness. It’s gone through iterations, but [the diary] used to be this thing that 30 people read regularly. It was something I would plunder constantly, all of it was grifts for other projects. Over time, especially on Substack, I’ve stopped plundering. And I think that’s made the diary better, because it’ll be published as a book in the fall. Some of it will show up in other places, but it’s slowly evolved from me posting my notebooks to becoming now, a step in formulating thoughts that might influence other things I might write. It’s like the cycle of life of a larger thematic thought process. Sleepers has a ton of my old blog, some I put in to parody, and some things, like a poem I wrote that I worked into Dan’s inner thought. As a technical matter, I think one thing that’s served me well is writing a lot of loose poetry every morning and not even thinking about those things as final poems, just language that’s more enigmatic or freer than a beat-by-beat novel. Integrating linguistic strings that are more ambiguous or lyrical into things that are more prosaic. It creates a unique texture.
Finally, what’s next? I saw you have three books coming out this year.
Yeah, my next play collection, the writers diary, and Sleepers. I sold another novel, which will come out next spring. Like The Sleepers, it’s bits and pieces of [past] writing. It might seem like I got incredibly prolific, but I didn’t get an agent until I was 33. It’s more the case that I have a lot of projects in the drawer. I guess I am an obsessive worker, so it makes me feel sane and decent to just keep going.
The Sleepers is out now.
