Millennial Insincerity and Cutting the Crap
A review of Matthew Gasda’s “The Sleepers” (Arcade Publishing, May 2025)
Once upon a time, I wrote a rough draft of a novel about a young man who despised the modern world so much, he wore his dead grandfather’s clothes and went to live in his dilapidated house. It was a piece of junk, but after I buried it in my drawer, I realized what I’d been doing all along. I’d been subconsciously teaching myself a lesson: you can’t live in the past. As much as he may be alienated from the geist of the age, a man – and especially a man who fancies himself a writer – must engage contemporary society to some extent. That does not mean he ought to surrender to its errors or laud it over the past, but the present is where we all live, and we must live in it.
This lesson is good and true and all, but every time I try to apply it to the books I read, every time I go digging for fiction young folks like myself are writing, I can’t help but step back into my proverbial grandfather’s house, for there is an odor in the atmosphere I can’t seem to stomach. If what I find is not a heedless woke political statement, an uncreative allegory for climate change or transgender issues or what have you, it is almost without fail the opposite side of the same vile coin: the visceral screeching of some disturbed neo-Nietzschean incel whose brain has been irreversibly fried by video games, anime, and internet porn.
Only recently have I read something that managed to transcend this dichotomy and, thus, become remotely worthy of serious consideration. Late last year, millennial playwright
Matthew Gasda emailed me asking if I would review his new novel, The Sleepers, which
Arcade Publishing released last month.1 I agreed, and he forwarded me a digital galley of the book.
The Sleepers is about the self-destruction of a self-deceptive millennial academic named Dan. Dan is starved for authenticity, but really has no idea what he wants and, therefore, no access to sincere motivations. He imagines himself a profound intellectual opposed to the System, but he is really a part of that System and a product of it.
“He was more of a Calvinist than a Marxist,” Gasda writes. “He believed that he was part of the elect. He couldn’t see that his intellectual posture was not, as he believed, a product of his ideological purity, but rather a behavior that he had acquired in order to flourish in the marketplace.”
There is also Makiro, Dan’s girlfriend, who cohabitates with him in their cramped New York City apartment. Makrio is an unsuccessful actress who has largely given up on her dream and given in to the mundane rhythms of everyday life. She is order, the Yang. By contrast, her sister Akari is the Yin, i.e., chaos. Akari is a cinematographer. She lives on the West Coast and comes to visit her sister from time to time. Unlike Makiro, she is successful in her career. She is happening. Her relationships are not frozen or stale but in a constant state of flux.
If not for this juxtaposition, Akari is largely irrelevant. Like a cinematographer in real life, she dwells in the peripheries of the action. Yet, the story begins with her arriving in New York, and Gasda tells us about Dan’s habit of subtly flirting with her. This detail has much less to do with the plot than it is symbolic: it is Dan hesitantly courting chaos.
But Dan’s head-first dive into chaos doesn’t come until later, when a young former female student of his initiates a conversation with him online after a late-night, inconclusive argument with Makiro. Like the serpent persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by convincing her that she is something that she is not, something capable of acting in the place of God, the former student, Eliza, seduces Dan in part by playing into his delusions of himself, lauding him as an impressive intellectual with profound ideas. Like Eve, Dan takes the bait. Makiro falls asleep, and he meets Eliza at a bar.
The meeting, however, doesn’t go as he expected. Eliza changes her mind about having sex with him, and Dan goes home not only, in his mind, empty-handed but also guilty for his disloyalty to Makiro.
Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Dan is an unsuccessful Übermensch. He may not be an axe murderer, but he has dispensed with morality only to fail at implementing his will. Now, he must wrestle with shame.
Unlike Raskolnikov, however, Dan finds no way out of it. He self-destructs, becomes obsessed with Eliza, and loses both Makiro and his job. Thus, he is attuned to Lise Kholkakov, another one of Dostoyevsky’s masterful inventions, who pities herself after calling off her betrothal to Alyosha Karamazov and failing to seduce his brother Ivan so purposefully slams her finger in a door.
After all is lost, Dan tells Makiro: “You can’t lie to yourself forever. It catches up to you. You think you understand why you’re engaging in a certain behavior, but the behavior’s tricking you.”
Gasda situates his story within a generation of Americans plagued with arrested development and terrified of responsibility. Most of his characters are quintessential millennials of the progressive coastal variety, inching toward middle age. Gasda pulls no punches when describing the conceited and insincere, yet simultaneously self-conscious and chronically anxious culture of which they are a part. For this reason, I expect that young people who fall within this category and wish to maintain the illusion of progress and self-righteousness rather than confront their hidden despair may take offense. So be it.
Though relentless in his presentation of these types, Gasda does offer them some semblance of hope. Whereas Dan retreats from his obligations into what Kierkegaard called the aesthetic and then to the demonic, Markiro makes something of a movement in the opposite direction. It doesn’t come without conflict of her own, but, at the end of the story, she is married with a child. She ultimately chooses commitment, responsibility, and self-giving, and finally becomes an adult.
My most pointed criticism of The Sleepers is not a matter of character or plot or style, but one of detail or of taste. As much as Gasda manages to shed the chronic unseriousness of his contemporaries, his novel remains bogged down by the same obscene obsessions that seem to possess nearly all young writers of literary fiction today.
By “obscene,” I do not mean merely indecent, but a kind of indecency that exceeds what is necessary, an indecency that does not serve the novel, but serves only to induce a sensation in the reader, be it revulsion, frustration, or concupiscence.2 Indecency being included in a novel for adults is not itself an issue. But, being a work of art, a novel demands unity.3 When indecency (or anything else4) detracts from that unity, it becomes an offense against the work of art itself.
Here, I can’t help but think of what Flannery O’Connor, who was not at all apprehensive about using the grotesque when it served her purposes, meant when she complained that “there are some fiction writers who feel they have to retire to the bathroom or the bed with every character every time he takes himself to either place.” I agree with her that “unless such a trip is used to further the story… it is in bad taste.”5
I’m afraid there are many such trips in The Sleepers that the story could have done without.
My issue, mind you, is not with sex. Sex is a part of life, and so is fair game for any writer who makes life his subject. And Gasda informing us about his characters’ sex lives is not all in vain. Part of the point of The Sleepers is the languish of its characters and the wider culture of which they are a part. Gasda’s use of sex has the effect of showing us just how far we’ve come from the optimistic “free love” ideals of the 1960s. After six decades of profaning the sacred, sex, for our generation, has by and large been de-eroticized, washed of its spiritual significance, and recategorized as a biological need alongside food and water. This “need,” of course, can now be fulfilled conveniently and artificially thanks to contemporary technology. Hence, young people, especially men, may be having less sex than did previous generations.6 Dan’s sexual adventure, after all, is not merely a quest for erotic pleasure. It is an attempt to “stir things up” because he is bored and helplessly insecure.
So, again, my grievance is not about sex. Yet, any writer who chooses to write about sexual desires, sexual acts, or sexual organs faces a unique practical predicament. He cannot simply write about genitals in the same way Michelangelo sculpted David’s. Nor can he write about breasts in the same way Giorgione painted those of Venus. C.S. Lewis recounted this predicament well enough:
“When you come to those parts of the body which are not usually mentioned, you will have to make a choice of vocabulary. And you will find that you have only four alternatives: a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word. You will not find any ordinary, neutral word, comparable to ‘hand’ or ‘nose.’ And this is going to be very troublesome. Whichever of the four words you choose is going to give a particular tone to your composition: willy-nilly you must produce baby-talk, or Wardour Street, or coarseness, or technical jargon. And each of these will force you to imply a particular attitude (which is not what you intended to imply) towards your material. The words will force you to write as if you thought it either childish, or quaint, or contemptible, or of purely scientific interest. In fact, mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment.”
Lewis is right. There is no neutral word like “hand” or “nose” for the male sexual organs, much less the female. If one is to write about them, he must choose a tone that is either juvenile or outdated or vulgar or technical. Gasda undoubtedly chooses to be vulgar, and if I were forced to choose from the four, I may have done the same. But the vulgar fails to serve the unity of his novel. It continues the very trend I found The Sleepers to be critical of: that of reducing sex to something less than it is, to an animalistic need and not something erotic or, dare I say, sacred.
The writer whose story requires sex for its purposes, and not for the purposes of arousing sensation, yet confronts the dilemma posed to us by our beloved English language, however, has another recourse: he can avoid going into detail. Writers can imply sexual behavior without immediately describing it. This is as true for unconventional sexual behaviors as for conventional ones, behaviors which fall well within the bounds of love as well as those which exemplify the darkest possibilities of man’s depravity. This concern is always secondary, of course, to the question of whether or not the sexual activity at hand is indeed necessary.
Perhaps what bothers me most about the obscenity in The Sleepers is not that primarily concerned with the sexual, but the blatantly unnecessary detours to the toilet. I can recall at least five detailed passages throughout this relatively short novel where, for no reason at all, we have to read about a character urinating or defecating. Here is one (reader discretion advised):
Mariko associated the smell of Dan’s shit with her father’s; those were the only two bathroom smells she’d ever known, besides, she supposed, her own. Women had a way of concealing their smells: it was semi-mystical, totally illogical, probably a function of repression. Nevertheless, the myth had power: she didn’t know what her sister’s shit smelled like, or her mother’s, or any woman’s
And another:
He felt the urge to shit.
Slipping off the chair, Dan took three steps towards the bathroom that was adjacent to the door, which opened to the kitchenette from the outside. He flipped the seat up with his bare toes, hiked his jeans down with his thumb, and sat down.
The shit slid out instantly because of the coffee. One, two, three, then four long loose stools.
And another:
She sat down on the toilet, pulled down her panties, felt warm piss shoot from between her legs into the toilet bowl—wiped, flushed, pushing the lever down with her toes. She didn’t wash her hands, didn’t care.”
Do you get the point? Just as we do not need to know about every breath a character takes or meal he eats, we do not need to know about every time he “gets off” or “relieves himself.”
Perhaps I’d be willing to let this slide if it were merely another bad feature of an already insufferable story, but here we have a novel that is at least serious, and I’m afraid such errors of taste detract from what it could be.
What’s sad is that this obsession with the obscene is so widespread, I can’t seem to find one young writer today who is not hung up on it. Obscenity is now so commonplace, it is cliche. Someone has to call it out eventually, even if the literati label him a prude.7
Writers in the mid-20th Century had their heyday writing stories that offended public sensibilities by pushing the limits of the taboo, especially on matters pertaining to sex. A provocateur could gain publicity and set himself apart from the flock by writing outside the boundaries of what was considered acceptable. If he was lucky, he’d even make it on a list of banned books, which, of course, meant more sales.
Today, millennials (and subsequently younger generations) are still working out how exactly to shed the “Boomer script,” so to speak. The Baby Boomers have defined and dominated the culture in the United States since at least the 1960s, and young people are still going through the motions that they initiated, though these motions don’t mean what they meant back then. They don’t mean anything because we have forgotten what they meant. This is why we had so many young folks larping as activists in the 2010s and 2020s, as if they were still fighting for civil rights and getting the snot beaten out of them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They weren’t. It is also why we have young writers pretending to write provocative novels that are no longer provocative.
What they don’t realize, however, is that what offended readers then is not what offends them now. We are so accustomed to the obscene, we are desensitized to it. Internet pornography aside, look at what Americans are watching. HBO is no longer the only place to get full frontals and the f-bomb. Can anyone find me a show on Netflix that someone 30 years ago would be comfortable watching with their parents? Americans are hyper-exposed to obscenity and are mostly bored with it. To keep overloading them with vulgar details and expecting the same reaction is like telling an old joke over and over again. The audience stopped laughing a long time ago.
Meanwhile, our nation’s literature faces a serious crisis. More and more Americans refuse to take literary fiction seriously. The blame for this, of course, cannot be cast entirely on the writer, who must write stories that interest him first and consider the interests of the reader and the critics later. Readers must approach literature prepared to wrestle with it and not demand to be instantaneously bombarded with dopamine like they are when they’re scrolling through TikTok. They must also be educated in such a way that prepares them to grapple with profound ideas on their own. Our education system, unfortunately, is no longer ordered toward this end.
But if any literary novel is to again capture the hearts and minds of an audience beyond that of a narrowly-defined niche, it’s not going to be Scrotie McBoogerballs8 but a work concerned primarily with the effective leap from the immediate to the ultimate. What readers want is one thing, but what they need is another, and what they need desperately is not to be shocked or offended necessarily but to be reminded that man has a soul and, therefore, a nature and a purpose.
It may well be true that this spiritual reality is itself more offensive to the contemporary reader than obscenity ever could be. But this offense is only an accident, an irrelevant consequence of what the serious writer must be trying to accomplish. Offensiveness per se is not one of his objectives. It never has been.
Do I think Gasda is consciously attempting to write an obscene novel for the sole purpose of offending the reader? I do not. I do, however, believe that the unfiltered obscenity trope is so cooked into the regimen of contemporary storytelling, a writer has to be extra careful to ask himself if every detail he intends to include serves a purpose. Call me old-fashioned, but I struggle to realize the profound symbolism of the turd.
But, like Aristotle, I believe plot and character ultimately matter more than style and detail, which is why I think what could be improved about Gasda’s novel does not completely override its principal seriousness. Though he at times indulges unnecessarily in obscene detail, he nevertheless manages to say something about not only our time and place but about man universally. What he says about our species is not pleasant, but it doesn’t have to be. It merely has to be true and, for the most part, it is.
Frederick Nietzsche may have been wrong about a lot, but he was right when he said we are “unknown to ourselves.” Gasda, in a day and age when literature seems to be struggling to say anything at all, at least manages to reaffirm this statement with something of an impact.
If only he would’ve cut the crap. And I mean that literally.
Notes:
I recognize that this review is late to the ball game, so-to-speak. The internet, and Substack in particular, has already had much to say about it, judging by the number of reviews that pop up in my feed. I have generally abstained from reading them as to keep my own criticism free of someone else’s ideas, though I’ve inevitably skimmed two or three. My tardiness is due in part to first taking a hiatus from writing during Lent and subsequently getting caught up in other projects, but it is also due to the fact that this is the first real book review I’ve ever written, that is: a thorough evaluation of a book recently published. My habitus for criticism is, therefore, not yet fully formed, and it has taken me several attempts to get this exactly how I wanted it.
That being said, my concern with obscenity, in this context, is not moral or political, but aesthetic. If Gasda intended The Sleepers to be included in the children’s section of the library, that would be a different story. But Gasda, I presume, intends The Sleepers to be read by adults. Adults, we hope, are mature enough to wrestle with complex, and oftentimes uncomfortable and indecent, facets of the human experience we would expect an honest work of literary fiction to explore.
Unity means elements working together and each serving a purpose to contribute to the point, which, in any story, is the leap from the immediate to the ultimate. The immediate and the ultimate are two facets of the same reality, the immediate being the familiar and the factual and the ultimate being some higher universal truth. Without this leap, we are right where we started. We are left with a detailed description of particulars and the action, which is the central feature of any story, lacks significance. And we, of course, expect all storytellers to tell us something worth listening to. For the writer of realism (which Gasda is) these expectations are the same, if not higher. The leap doesn’t have to be probable, but it must be possible and convincing. This is a difficult and terrifying responsibility. And any realist runs the risk that by beginning with the immediate details of daily life, he gets caught up in them and either fails to take the leap altogether or hesitates, thereby reducing its effect and obstructing the unity of the story.
A writer could make just as grave a mistake by needlessly inducing the opposite kind of sensation (that of comfort or self-righteousness or false hope), or by detracting from the story in any way in order to avoid offending the reader.
This quote is from O’Connor’s 1956 letter to Eileen Hall, the editor of the book page for The Bulletin, a Catholic diocesan paper for which O’Connor wrote book reviews. The full quote is as follows:
“About bad taste, I don’t know, because taste is a relative matter. There are some who will find almost everything in bad taste, from spitting in the street to Christ’s association with Mary Magdalen. Fiction is supposed to represent life, and the fiction writer has to use as many aspects of life as are necessary to make his total picture convincing. The fiction writer doesn’t state, he shows, renders. It’s the nature of fiction and it can’t be helped. If you’re writing about the vulgar, you have to prove they’re vulgar by showing them at it. The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment. You have to have enough of either to prove your point but no more. Of course there are some fiction writers who feel they have to retire to the bathroom or the bed with every character every time he takes himself to either place. Unless such a trip is used to further the story, I feel it is in bad taste. In the second chapter of my novel, I have such a scene but I felt it was vital to the meaning. I don’t think you have to worry much about bad taste with a competent writer, because he uses everything for a reason. The reader may not always see the reason. But it’s when sex or scurrility are used for their own sakes, that they are in bad taste.”
From a recent analysis by the Institute for Family Studies of data from the National Survey of Family Growth:
“In sum, for young adult males, sexlessness has roughly doubled across all measures over the last 10 years or so. For young adult females, it has risen by roughly 50 percent.”
Do I expect to be called a prude? I don’t know what to expect. I imagine people will either pay no to no attention to this, or someone will get deeply offended by it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe people will listen to me and we can read good books again without having to read about poop.
What is Scrotie McBoogerballs, you ask? If you are asking yourself this question, dear reader, kudos. You obviously have more taste than my dear friend Christian who insisted I make a connection to his favorite animated satire South Park, which is so frequently banal but often perceptive. In the second episode of the fourteenth season, Cartman and the boys write an exceptionally vulgar novel, titled The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, which has no point apart from being intentionally disgusting. It is, in fact, so gross, no one can read it without vomiting. The boys attribute the novel to their classmate Butters, who is celebrated as a literary genius as the public reads meaning into the book that was never there.
*L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.