A Theater Inside: Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers – Garth Miró
April 14, 2025
What better tool does a writer possess than their ability to torture? Gasda is a good torturer. Without sympathy. Without most things. The cluttering variables. He delivers his characters a clean anguish. Whether they answer the question or not, he gets them to spit the truth out. Brings out what’s within: desires.
“There was grief in this reversion to nameless hunger, revulsion at the erotic conditions of his life.” This is Dan.
Dan wants life subsumed by grander narratives. Things he’s seen in the media. Read in stories. He’s been a person in charge of a life far too long and is done. All the want, the permanent engine of desire. He sees a line. On one side, the real people still attached to their human struggles. On the other, ideas. The things before our attempts and actions. The things also now ahead of us. Our territory is the shrinking line. Ideas have taken over because of our endless output. Our attempts to rise to glory, above desire. We’ve swelled their ranks beyond recognition. Their army is bigger. Dan knows offering the last of your indigenous scraps is the only way to switch sides.
Let them be ideas.
Let them go ahead of you.
Are we our works? Are we still here, truly? What is certain, is Gasda is outworking everyone. This book is all the desire he’s applied pressure to, tortured over so many mediums and iterations and venues. Here is where, chopped away, it comes out.
One thing I kept feeling as I read, was that Gasda clearly knows there’s nothing worse than the success of someone close to you. Keep tabs rather than bonds. Create elaborate systems of hate, then rationalization. Gasda’s characters do this. Dan. The sisters. To try and relieve themselves of any inkling to fight. “It was better to give up hope, to renounce everything extraordinary about oneself, than it was to be stranded inside the deceptive paradigm of self-actualization—of a growing, overflowing, inner-life.” They think a lot. Talk a lot. Which is smart on Gasda’s part; it’s boring when mutes suffer.
Maybe it’s our fortune that Gasda was born (and therefore also his characters) in the wrong samsaric cycle. Only here, where we’ve just now realized we’ve lost to ideas, too late to do anything about it, can he properly lead his Sleepers, in third person, around and around by the chains of desire. Things no one deserves and will never get. For if they ever actually got what they wanted, they wouldn’t be written. There’d be nothing left. We’d be looking to an empty theater inside.
NOTE: I don’t like reviews. They’re mostly done between friends and therefore useless. There are no bad books anymore. God has blessed me with no friends, but unfortunately, Gasda’s The Sleepers is not bad. You should go and buy and read it.