It definitely would not help to have read The Human Stain because it is a terrible book, actually one of Roth's worst.
Thanks for this fairly even-handed review; I have two quibbles with it that maybe are just my own little pricklinesses of the same kind they observe. You complain about NY books, and resenting knowing the cultural differences between Greenpoint and Williamsburg (which is a funny line) and then insist books would be better to be set in more "interesting" places. But to set a book in any other place as well would require just the kind of intricate and intimate scene-setting about that place that you resent about NY novels. Personally even before I lived there, and certainly since, I have never resented NY settings. I also don't resent detailed LA settings, or San Francisco, or Glasgow, London, St. Petersburg, or Montreal (or D.C., clears throat). It isn't inherent to fiction that it have a localized sense of place but certain stories work best with that grounding, and certainly it can be great about rural places too (see Chris Offutt or, my God, Faulkner). I see comments like that and I a roll my eyes at the performative provincialism that wants to shout its credibility as repping for somewhere OTHER than the center. Please give Balzac's Lost Illusions a try and see if it clarifies why this stance is perfectly fruitful aesthetically but extremely tedious both on Substack and generally. You are a smart, thoughtful, and noninstitutional reader/reviewer and it sucks to see reflexive parochialism mar a review.
Secondarily, I note that you admit not reading much contemporary fiction but I gotta tell you, the "telling over showing" is real and standard and commonplace. It's valid if it works, it can weigh down when it doesn't. It is very European in some ways, except European writers are more subtle about it, or at least what it is doing. See Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas or The Postcard by Anne Berest (admittedly also autofiction so somewhat aside of my point) for examples that to my mind, work, or see Paul Auster's Book of Illusions or Leviathan for an American albeit heavily indebted to Europeans who makes it work. Also recall Victorians like Dickens and Collins. Even our beloved PKD does it, albeit most obviously when he was working under a deadline and produced subpar work. I guess my peeve here isn't so much that you are "wrong" for noting this, as that the "show don't tell dynamic" is both highly cliche and not really all that relevant even when it was common, because it is the type of "rule" most honored in the breach.
I apologize; I'm writing fast because i have paying work to get back to, and i realize without rereading that this is a bit lecture-y. Please accept my sincere assurance that it was not so intended and my compliments for writing the review that prompted this; it's always a pleasure to read your thoughts on books. Sooner or later I will get back to Martian Time-Slip and update you on whether it has become unreadable to me as to you. Cheers.
Appreciate this comment. I’ll take the compliment from one of Substack’s toughest critics!
You’re absolutely right, my anti-NY sentiment is irrational, born from the chip on my shoulder from growing up in Chicago. I’m a Chicago supremacist. I’ve enjoyed my brief visits to NY over the years, but imo the city fails to live up to its mythology, and I find the insistence on its primacy totally tiresome. I’d probably feel differently if I’d moved to NYC instead of DC after college, as many of my peers did. I’d probably be a smug New Yorker. But I didn’t, so I’m (hyper)sensitive to New York-centrist grandiosity whenever it shows up. To be fair to Gasda, The Sleepers doesn’t overly glamorize NYC— in fact he makes it sound like kind of a shitty place to live, full of rich assholes and dilettantes, which does comport with my own prejudices.
Re: telling vs showing, I think I didn’t describe it quite right. There’s something more going on in this book than just an abundance of “telling.” I think what I found disorienting was that he rapidly switches between narrative voices without marking those changes. So we’ll get a true close third person look into a character’s thoughts, and then in the next sentence there will be a third person omniscient insight into that same character’s psyche. And I had to re-read and question if that was a character’s thought or if it was narration. I’m not sure if that’s something that’s also common/trendy in contemporary lit. I found it quite jarring but also interesting.
I have Leviathan by Auster on my list, will keep this in mind when I eventually read it.
Tell don’t show novels (fiction in general) can be great. It doesn’t need defending. But it might be criticized when it’s done only for convenience, either for the writer or the reader. As you say, it’s much the thing right now, and some amount of it is to save both parties the trouble of imagining scenes. It’s not the worst of things, but there’s a trend.
"Show don't tell," if followed with absolute consistency, would bloat novels to hideous lengths. The only novel I've read that follows this rule 100% is "The Maltese Falcon," and it has to leave a lot out - you don't find out much about Sam Spade's background, why he got into detective work, etc. But it did produce a novel that was ready-made for cinema.
Thank you for this review. It sounds detailed, well-balanced and fair (with the proviso that I haven't read the book yet). Everyone seems to like the book, but certain things raise alarm bells: 1. it's about the NYC intellectual layabout class (please, not again), 2. you say there's no humor (I need at least some of that, although humor of course is subjective), 3. I usually find writing about sex boring or off-putting, and you say there's a lot of it. I still may give it a shot, but this is a helpful review.
Having read the book and many of the reviews, this is probably the most accurate one I’ve read so far. Not coincidentally it actually deals with the style of the book as opposed to just its themes.
Speaking of style. I found a sample of the book on the Arcade site. I was startled at how sloppy and flat the prose was. Most notable was an over-reliance on generalizing adverbs: basically, totally, increasingly, incredibly. I counted 3 "basicallys" in fewer than 200 words. Which is basically pretty annoying.
Caveats: I'm not gonna judge the book from a sample; I'm not basically opposed to adverbs; I recognize that plenty of powerful storytellers (Gissing, Dreiser) were lackluster stylists. But I have to admit that this appetizer did not make me hungry for more.
Yeah so (without knowing exactly what the excerpt was) I think that's a deliberate feature of the narration since it does hew so closely to the characters. Part of the point seems to be how banal the mental worlds of these supposed intellectuals and artists are. I've now read a little of Gasda's earlier prose and it's much more lyrical and lush, so I've deduced that the plainer style he chose for Sleepers was a conscious choice. Doesn't mean you won't still find it annoying, but at least it isn't thoughtless.
Basically, it looked like an incredibly and totally conscious choice on the author's part. Whether that's something that increasingly works over the long run is the sort of thing that's basically impossible to judge from an excerpt.
As Lillian correctly pointed out, the book does a lot of telling rather than showing. This can work--I really think any style can work--but in this case, it means the reader has to already agree with Gasda's analysis of his own characters. If they don't, if they're skeptical that "everyone sucks" as pointed out in this review, then there's not much to convince them otherwise in terms of the events of the story. I will probably try to pull my thoughts together later on for a piece.
Great review. I recommend Jim Carroll’s ‘Basketball Diaries’ (1978) if you’re looking for something more authentic and countercultural in relation to the culture in Manhattan/ lower east side scenes. Carroll actually grew up working class in the 60s in manhattan & basketball diaries describes his childhood drifting in and out of inwood / lower east side, experience in Catholic schools, basketball success, drug culture & degeneracy. He does the beatnik prose very well & the novel has a lot of humour (unlike a lot of the modern dime square stuff). Carroll himself is a very interesting figure who wrote a lot of poetry and formed his own punk band (Jim Carroll band) & was involved in the punk scene with Patti smith, Keith Richard’s, velvet underground, the ramones, the sex pistols.
I’m hesitant to include those kinds of critiques because it certainly isn’t a white man’s responsibility to elucidate the hapa psyche or interracial dating dynamics, but I was disappointed he didn’t go deeper because I think he could’ve done something interesting with it. I’ve got some thoughts on how hapa characters are portrayed by non-hapa authors, may eventually do a full post on it once the ideas coalesce
Yeah, having seen this myself, I have a hypothesis it has to do with American vs East Asian concepts of masculinity, and would like to hear from people with an actual firsthand experience of the cultures in question.
From what I understand (and I am only a dilettante Sinophile), in China there's wu (physical and martial prowess), and wen (cultural and scholarly attainment)--similar to our jock-geek divide (though there were more humanistic and cultural aspects like calligraphy and poetry), *but* the 'geek' end is the *preferred* end, whereas in the USA it is the reverse! Not sure how it works in Korea or Japan, but I do know Korea had an exam system modeled on the Chinese keju for a long time and still has an exam-heavy education system with the Suneung being a huge deal, and the Japanese have cram schools for theirs.
So nerdy white guys are a lot more attractive, *all else equal*, to Asian women than they are to white women. (I imagine the effect declines the more generations spent in the USA.) But it doesn't work the other way, because a nerdy Asian guy gets hit with the status penalty for being a minority *and* for being a nerd (bad in the USA).
Of course there are a hundred other factors, and every man and woman is an individual. But at the aggregate level it could (help?) produce the disparity we see.
It would be very interesting to see why this is different from the Jewish experience—they also valued scholarship, but you didn’t see the same discrepancy. (Though my mom was Jewish and didn’t think it was fair how little people valued my scholastic achievements. ;) )
I have no data to back this up, but I'd be willing to wager that a disproportionate number of WMAF/AMWF pairings involve a Jewish partner because of those cultural affinities and societal positioning of the two groups. In fact I recall one Asian American Marxist scholar proclaiming that Asian Americans are 'the new Jews.' I'm the product of one such pairing. So was my high school boyfriend. Harold and Kumar made the 'Jew with yellow fever' trope ubiquitous, which of course reflects some level of reality but which I found personally annoying-- I did not enjoy being asked during adolescence if my dad had an Asian fetish.
Totally. I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about it, and I think I would have even if I hadn’t committed to writing a review. I think it’ll provoke a lot of conversations once it’s out in the world.
I also appreciated the angle you took in your review, even though it’s not the way I was thinking about the book.
OK, read the book as suggested. (In my case it was over the course of a day, while trapped in an airport.) I'm a STEM guy, not a literature guy, so I'm operating out of my field (and am not qualified to tell whether he is the next Roth or Bellow), but:
1. I can see why Gasda had to publish this through Skyhorse. There are many conservative and/or antiwoke themes, including the dubious value of the artistic life (as Mariko says near the end, it's like bathing in your filth), the way sexual mores in academia now favor women rather than men, the value of childbearing to a life (notice that it's after having a kid Mariko starts to become less selfish, and Dan refuses to do so and goes nowhere), mockery of his Marxist views (he doesn't really do anything and the implication is it's all empty intellectualism), and the injustice of cancellation (did he really deserve all that for something the other person initiated?).
2. He tells rather than shows, and there's a lot of interior navel-gazing. But...that's appropriate for the characters! They *are* a bunch of navel-gazing intellectuals! You could argue he should have more range, but novels of manners are a genre, and there's something to be said for doing at least that well.
3. I agree with you that nobody was really likable. But, if he leans right now, that would be the point, right? Leftists in 2016 suck. They should drop the Brooklyn apartments and have kids like Mariko.
4. I see your connection to Roth. Horny guys getting in trouble (though times have changed, and that's definitely something to reflect in a novel).
5. I think the Japan thing is not (as I initially assumed) anime/manga-coded or imperialist-coded. I think it's more of an 'exotic but not too exotic' thing. Japan is a first-world nation, and has been for the lives of most adults now. It lets them be from far away, but not be striving to prove themselves (and more importantly, make money rather than art) like first-generation immigrants often are. It's like being French or British (to list a few other G7 members who also imperialized quite a bit). 'Mariko' puts me in mind of Marie Kondo, who was famous for telling the professional-managerial class to throw out all their stuff after wishing it goodbye. Japan here is (IMHO) 'artsy sophisticated country that's far away'. As you point out, the other half is barely mentioned, and I suspect Gasda is mentally rounding off to full Asian but going half lets him avoid having to depict a traditional Japanese family, where he'd be out of his depth talking about cram schools, 'New Year's noodles', and black companies.
6. Random stuff: 'chaotic neutral' on Tinder. It's pretty funny the way something amazingly nerdy-- the original source is *Dungeons & Dragons*-- slips into the profile of someone who probably wouldn't have given a bunch of D&D players the time of day.
7. It's quite logical you sympathized with Eliza and then Mariko; I sympathized with Dan, though I avoided his fate by completely shutting off that part of me (which then caused problems when I was out of school and finally wanted to start dating).
Anyway, good review. It turned me onto the book and picked out a lot of things I wouldn't otherwise have done. Bravo!
You've done a good job here. You've convinced me not to read the book.
It's one thing to write a funny, scathing book where not a single character is admirable or worth caring about; the comic possibilities are endless. It's another to write one that isn't funny. And what you write about Gasda's tendency to trumpet what ought to be the subtext just makes the book, and the author, seem rather shallow. Part of the point of not explaining everything about your characters or the things they do is that the reader can examine them and reach their own conclusions, rather than having the meaning of everything handed to them on a plate. If a writer has to tell everything, it's probably because he doesn't know how to just show it. And I'm not sure I buy your remark about this "style" making it possible for readers to "interact with the book in a different way"; you don't suggest what this "different way" might be, and anyway, it's not as if this is the first novel ever to put everything on the surface.
Given the quote about Xavier being "so old; he carried the stench of death", I wonder how old he actually is? (The review barely mentions him; I have no idea who is he is or how he relates to the other characters, aside from that one sexual rejection scene.) Is Mariko really reacting to a huge age difference, or is she reacting more to the feeling that she's no longer a "pretty young thing" herself? (This is probably obvious if one reads the book.)
Yeah, I sometimes find the “everyone sucks” category of media to be tiresome, but I think what made Sleepers compelling for me in spite of its faults was the gossipy aspect. It was like suddenly having access to the inner monologues of a group of people you love to hate from afar on Instagram.
I disagree that the telling vs showing style is a skill issue. It’s pretty clearly an authorial choice in this case; whether you like it or not is a different question. but yeah I’m not exactly sure what the “different way” would be either, since whatever expansive possibilities I sensed were ultimately not realized in this book.
Oops I guess I should’ve introduced Xavier better. He’s 30 years older than Mariko, and had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
It was not my intention to dissuade anyone from reading the book, but if it sounds like something you want to avoid, glad I could be helpful.
That helps. So Xavier is in his early 60s. I can understand a woman of 32 finding that a turn-off when it comes to sex. If Mariko knows about the terminal diagnosis, that would also contribute to the "stench of death". (Or it might, in a different character, inspire compassion rather than revulsion.)
I'm forgetting titles and authors, but I recall reading novels back in the '90s by late-boomer/early-GenX writers who similarly went into considerable and explicit detail about characters who were ultimately not all that interesting, and the effort seemed wasted, since the deep dive into banality didn't seem to serve any higher purpose. That may be why I react to your review as I do.
I've bought the book and have to read it now, but one thought about 'why Japanese':
Japan was the first non-Western country to become rich and export its culture the way America does. (You are seeing this now with South Korea and K-pop and K-dramas). So a lot of nerdy white guys in the 80s and 90s were into Japanese stuff because it was exotic, and then in the 2000s and 2010s a lot of kids in general were into it because there was just a lot of manga and anime available, and some of it was quite good. (I think some of it also catered to teenage boys and young men in a way American popular culture has stopped doing, but there's plenty that doesn't--there's lots of shojo and josei manga as well.)
So I think it may be more 'pop-culture-fantasy-coded' than 'imperialist-coded'. Your average American knows nothing about the (notoriously brutal) Japanese occupation of Korea and attempts to eliminate the Korean language, comfort women in WW2, Unit 731, or the Rape of Nanjing.
Growing up in the 2000s I got a lot of "oh you're Korean? I love anime"-type comments from nerdy dudes (white and black), so I see where you're coming from in terms of what Japan represents for millennials.
In the case of The Sleepers, though, I'm not sure that J-culture export is what's being gestured at with Mariko's ethnic background. Agree that even most educated Americans don't realize Japan was the Nazi Germany of Asia-- there's a tendency to think of Japan as more or less innocent victims because of the whole Hiroshima/Nagasaki thing and the way white liberal guilt works in America. But Matthew Gasda isn't an average American, and I suspect he was being deliberately cheeky by making this character the genetic embodiment of the Axis powers, lol. Despite being a "submissive female Asian body," she is no one-sided victim in the relationship.
I responded above. Having read the book, I agree it's not the anime thing. I think, though, it's kind of another rich country here. They don't really seem to be struggling all that much. I agree she's definitely no victim, she's roughly equal in the decaying relationship until Dan goes and cheats (and then, of course, she independently evens the scale).
'Submissive female Asian body' is the way she describes what she thinks Dan thinks of her, but it's not clear he thinks of her that way. If anything he seems to think she holds all the cards, except financial. He seems to be used to that, and seems to be part of the reason he keeps going after Eliza (in addition to the usual midlife crisis).
I haven't read the book, but the review was well- written and entertaining. Bravo.
thank you!
It definitely would not help to have read The Human Stain because it is a terrible book, actually one of Roth's worst.
Thanks for this fairly even-handed review; I have two quibbles with it that maybe are just my own little pricklinesses of the same kind they observe. You complain about NY books, and resenting knowing the cultural differences between Greenpoint and Williamsburg (which is a funny line) and then insist books would be better to be set in more "interesting" places. But to set a book in any other place as well would require just the kind of intricate and intimate scene-setting about that place that you resent about NY novels. Personally even before I lived there, and certainly since, I have never resented NY settings. I also don't resent detailed LA settings, or San Francisco, or Glasgow, London, St. Petersburg, or Montreal (or D.C., clears throat). It isn't inherent to fiction that it have a localized sense of place but certain stories work best with that grounding, and certainly it can be great about rural places too (see Chris Offutt or, my God, Faulkner). I see comments like that and I a roll my eyes at the performative provincialism that wants to shout its credibility as repping for somewhere OTHER than the center. Please give Balzac's Lost Illusions a try and see if it clarifies why this stance is perfectly fruitful aesthetically but extremely tedious both on Substack and generally. You are a smart, thoughtful, and noninstitutional reader/reviewer and it sucks to see reflexive parochialism mar a review.
Secondarily, I note that you admit not reading much contemporary fiction but I gotta tell you, the "telling over showing" is real and standard and commonplace. It's valid if it works, it can weigh down when it doesn't. It is very European in some ways, except European writers are more subtle about it, or at least what it is doing. See Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas or The Postcard by Anne Berest (admittedly also autofiction so somewhat aside of my point) for examples that to my mind, work, or see Paul Auster's Book of Illusions or Leviathan for an American albeit heavily indebted to Europeans who makes it work. Also recall Victorians like Dickens and Collins. Even our beloved PKD does it, albeit most obviously when he was working under a deadline and produced subpar work. I guess my peeve here isn't so much that you are "wrong" for noting this, as that the "show don't tell dynamic" is both highly cliche and not really all that relevant even when it was common, because it is the type of "rule" most honored in the breach.
I apologize; I'm writing fast because i have paying work to get back to, and i realize without rereading that this is a bit lecture-y. Please accept my sincere assurance that it was not so intended and my compliments for writing the review that prompted this; it's always a pleasure to read your thoughts on books. Sooner or later I will get back to Martian Time-Slip and update you on whether it has become unreadable to me as to you. Cheers.
Appreciate this comment. I’ll take the compliment from one of Substack’s toughest critics!
You’re absolutely right, my anti-NY sentiment is irrational, born from the chip on my shoulder from growing up in Chicago. I’m a Chicago supremacist. I’ve enjoyed my brief visits to NY over the years, but imo the city fails to live up to its mythology, and I find the insistence on its primacy totally tiresome. I’d probably feel differently if I’d moved to NYC instead of DC after college, as many of my peers did. I’d probably be a smug New Yorker. But I didn’t, so I’m (hyper)sensitive to New York-centrist grandiosity whenever it shows up. To be fair to Gasda, The Sleepers doesn’t overly glamorize NYC— in fact he makes it sound like kind of a shitty place to live, full of rich assholes and dilettantes, which does comport with my own prejudices.
Re: telling vs showing, I think I didn’t describe it quite right. There’s something more going on in this book than just an abundance of “telling.” I think what I found disorienting was that he rapidly switches between narrative voices without marking those changes. So we’ll get a true close third person look into a character’s thoughts, and then in the next sentence there will be a third person omniscient insight into that same character’s psyche. And I had to re-read and question if that was a character’s thought or if it was narration. I’m not sure if that’s something that’s also common/trendy in contemporary lit. I found it quite jarring but also interesting.
I have Leviathan by Auster on my list, will keep this in mind when I eventually read it.
Tell don’t show novels (fiction in general) can be great. It doesn’t need defending. But it might be criticized when it’s done only for convenience, either for the writer or the reader. As you say, it’s much the thing right now, and some amount of it is to save both parties the trouble of imagining scenes. It’s not the worst of things, but there’s a trend.
"Show don't tell," if followed with absolute consistency, would bloat novels to hideous lengths. The only novel I've read that follows this rule 100% is "The Maltese Falcon," and it has to leave a lot out - you don't find out much about Sam Spade's background, why he got into detective work, etc. But it did produce a novel that was ready-made for cinema.
Thank you for this review. It sounds detailed, well-balanced and fair (with the proviso that I haven't read the book yet). Everyone seems to like the book, but certain things raise alarm bells: 1. it's about the NYC intellectual layabout class (please, not again), 2. you say there's no humor (I need at least some of that, although humor of course is subjective), 3. I usually find writing about sex boring or off-putting, and you say there's a lot of it. I still may give it a shot, but this is a helpful review.
I guess I’d say there is some dark humor, but it mostly lies in how hypocritical and/or pathetic the characters are.
Having read the book and many of the reviews, this is probably the most accurate one I’ve read so far. Not coincidentally it actually deals with the style of the book as opposed to just its themes.
Speaking of style. I found a sample of the book on the Arcade site. I was startled at how sloppy and flat the prose was. Most notable was an over-reliance on generalizing adverbs: basically, totally, increasingly, incredibly. I counted 3 "basicallys" in fewer than 200 words. Which is basically pretty annoying.
Caveats: I'm not gonna judge the book from a sample; I'm not basically opposed to adverbs; I recognize that plenty of powerful storytellers (Gissing, Dreiser) were lackluster stylists. But I have to admit that this appetizer did not make me hungry for more.
Yeah so (without knowing exactly what the excerpt was) I think that's a deliberate feature of the narration since it does hew so closely to the characters. Part of the point seems to be how banal the mental worlds of these supposed intellectuals and artists are. I've now read a little of Gasda's earlier prose and it's much more lyrical and lush, so I've deduced that the plainer style he chose for Sleepers was a conscious choice. Doesn't mean you won't still find it annoying, but at least it isn't thoughtless.
Basically, it looked like an incredibly and totally conscious choice on the author's part. Whether that's something that increasingly works over the long run is the sort of thing that's basically impossible to judge from an excerpt.
🤣 I will say that I didn’t find the adverbs that distracting!
BTW the excerpt is here if you're curious:
https://arcadepublishing.substack.com/p/the-sleepers-by-matthew-gasda
As Lillian correctly pointed out, the book does a lot of telling rather than showing. This can work--I really think any style can work--but in this case, it means the reader has to already agree with Gasda's analysis of his own characters. If they don't, if they're skeptical that "everyone sucks" as pointed out in this review, then there's not much to convince them otherwise in terms of the events of the story. I will probably try to pull my thoughts together later on for a piece.
Look forward to reading it!
Great review. I recommend Jim Carroll’s ‘Basketball Diaries’ (1978) if you’re looking for something more authentic and countercultural in relation to the culture in Manhattan/ lower east side scenes. Carroll actually grew up working class in the 60s in manhattan & basketball diaries describes his childhood drifting in and out of inwood / lower east side, experience in Catholic schools, basketball success, drug culture & degeneracy. He does the beatnik prose very well & the novel has a lot of humour (unlike a lot of the modern dime square stuff). Carroll himself is a very interesting figure who wrote a lot of poetry and formed his own punk band (Jim Carroll band) & was involved in the punk scene with Patti smith, Keith Richard’s, velvet underground, the ramones, the sex pistols.
Ah I love Basketball Diaries! One of the great drug books. And I love Catholic Boy.
5 to 10 books at once! Probably the most insightful line of your review, the gravity of attention cannot be overstated!
I have a very chaotic and inefficient reading style 😅
Good review.
Thanks for saving me the trouble, brave soul!
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Great review!
Thought a bit more about the race piece - I agree that there was some interesting ground that could've explored here (but wasn't).
I’m hesitant to include those kinds of critiques because it certainly isn’t a white man’s responsibility to elucidate the hapa psyche or interracial dating dynamics, but I was disappointed he didn’t go deeper because I think he could’ve done something interesting with it. I’ve got some thoughts on how hapa characters are portrayed by non-hapa authors, may eventually do a full post on it once the ideas coalesce
I think that would be a very interesting post - a topic of curiosity for many.
Yeah, having seen this myself, I have a hypothesis it has to do with American vs East Asian concepts of masculinity, and would like to hear from people with an actual firsthand experience of the cultures in question.
From what I understand (and I am only a dilettante Sinophile), in China there's wu (physical and martial prowess), and wen (cultural and scholarly attainment)--similar to our jock-geek divide (though there were more humanistic and cultural aspects like calligraphy and poetry), *but* the 'geek' end is the *preferred* end, whereas in the USA it is the reverse! Not sure how it works in Korea or Japan, but I do know Korea had an exam system modeled on the Chinese keju for a long time and still has an exam-heavy education system with the Suneung being a huge deal, and the Japanese have cram schools for theirs.
So nerdy white guys are a lot more attractive, *all else equal*, to Asian women than they are to white women. (I imagine the effect declines the more generations spent in the USA.) But it doesn't work the other way, because a nerdy Asian guy gets hit with the status penalty for being a minority *and* for being a nerd (bad in the USA).
Of course there are a hundred other factors, and every man and woman is an individual. But at the aggregate level it could (help?) produce the disparity we see.
It would be very interesting to see why this is different from the Jewish experience—they also valued scholarship, but you didn’t see the same discrepancy. (Though my mom was Jewish and didn’t think it was fair how little people valued my scholastic achievements. ;) )
I have no data to back this up, but I'd be willing to wager that a disproportionate number of WMAF/AMWF pairings involve a Jewish partner because of those cultural affinities and societal positioning of the two groups. In fact I recall one Asian American Marxist scholar proclaiming that Asian Americans are 'the new Jews.' I'm the product of one such pairing. So was my high school boyfriend. Harold and Kumar made the 'Jew with yellow fever' trope ubiquitous, which of course reflects some level of reality but which I found personally annoying-- I did not enjoy being asked during adolescence if my dad had an Asian fetish.
The book also reminded me of Roth, but tamer. I enjoyed your review; say what you will about the book, it definitely invites deep thought.
Totally. I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about it, and I think I would have even if I hadn’t committed to writing a review. I think it’ll provoke a lot of conversations once it’s out in the world.
I also appreciated the angle you took in your review, even though it’s not the way I was thinking about the book.
OK, read the book as suggested. (In my case it was over the course of a day, while trapped in an airport.) I'm a STEM guy, not a literature guy, so I'm operating out of my field (and am not qualified to tell whether he is the next Roth or Bellow), but:
1. I can see why Gasda had to publish this through Skyhorse. There are many conservative and/or antiwoke themes, including the dubious value of the artistic life (as Mariko says near the end, it's like bathing in your filth), the way sexual mores in academia now favor women rather than men, the value of childbearing to a life (notice that it's after having a kid Mariko starts to become less selfish, and Dan refuses to do so and goes nowhere), mockery of his Marxist views (he doesn't really do anything and the implication is it's all empty intellectualism), and the injustice of cancellation (did he really deserve all that for something the other person initiated?).
2. He tells rather than shows, and there's a lot of interior navel-gazing. But...that's appropriate for the characters! They *are* a bunch of navel-gazing intellectuals! You could argue he should have more range, but novels of manners are a genre, and there's something to be said for doing at least that well.
3. I agree with you that nobody was really likable. But, if he leans right now, that would be the point, right? Leftists in 2016 suck. They should drop the Brooklyn apartments and have kids like Mariko.
4. I see your connection to Roth. Horny guys getting in trouble (though times have changed, and that's definitely something to reflect in a novel).
5. I think the Japan thing is not (as I initially assumed) anime/manga-coded or imperialist-coded. I think it's more of an 'exotic but not too exotic' thing. Japan is a first-world nation, and has been for the lives of most adults now. It lets them be from far away, but not be striving to prove themselves (and more importantly, make money rather than art) like first-generation immigrants often are. It's like being French or British (to list a few other G7 members who also imperialized quite a bit). 'Mariko' puts me in mind of Marie Kondo, who was famous for telling the professional-managerial class to throw out all their stuff after wishing it goodbye. Japan here is (IMHO) 'artsy sophisticated country that's far away'. As you point out, the other half is barely mentioned, and I suspect Gasda is mentally rounding off to full Asian but going half lets him avoid having to depict a traditional Japanese family, where he'd be out of his depth talking about cram schools, 'New Year's noodles', and black companies.
6. Random stuff: 'chaotic neutral' on Tinder. It's pretty funny the way something amazingly nerdy-- the original source is *Dungeons & Dragons*-- slips into the profile of someone who probably wouldn't have given a bunch of D&D players the time of day.
7. It's quite logical you sympathized with Eliza and then Mariko; I sympathized with Dan, though I avoided his fate by completely shutting off that part of me (which then caused problems when I was out of school and finally wanted to start dating).
Anyway, good review. It turned me onto the book and picked out a lot of things I wouldn't otherwise have done. Bravo!
You've done a good job here. You've convinced me not to read the book.
It's one thing to write a funny, scathing book where not a single character is admirable or worth caring about; the comic possibilities are endless. It's another to write one that isn't funny. And what you write about Gasda's tendency to trumpet what ought to be the subtext just makes the book, and the author, seem rather shallow. Part of the point of not explaining everything about your characters or the things they do is that the reader can examine them and reach their own conclusions, rather than having the meaning of everything handed to them on a plate. If a writer has to tell everything, it's probably because he doesn't know how to just show it. And I'm not sure I buy your remark about this "style" making it possible for readers to "interact with the book in a different way"; you don't suggest what this "different way" might be, and anyway, it's not as if this is the first novel ever to put everything on the surface.
Given the quote about Xavier being "so old; he carried the stench of death", I wonder how old he actually is? (The review barely mentions him; I have no idea who is he is or how he relates to the other characters, aside from that one sexual rejection scene.) Is Mariko really reacting to a huge age difference, or is she reacting more to the feeling that she's no longer a "pretty young thing" herself? (This is probably obvious if one reads the book.)
Yeah, I sometimes find the “everyone sucks” category of media to be tiresome, but I think what made Sleepers compelling for me in spite of its faults was the gossipy aspect. It was like suddenly having access to the inner monologues of a group of people you love to hate from afar on Instagram.
I disagree that the telling vs showing style is a skill issue. It’s pretty clearly an authorial choice in this case; whether you like it or not is a different question. but yeah I’m not exactly sure what the “different way” would be either, since whatever expansive possibilities I sensed were ultimately not realized in this book.
Oops I guess I should’ve introduced Xavier better. He’s 30 years older than Mariko, and had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
It was not my intention to dissuade anyone from reading the book, but if it sounds like something you want to avoid, glad I could be helpful.
That helps. So Xavier is in his early 60s. I can understand a woman of 32 finding that a turn-off when it comes to sex. If Mariko knows about the terminal diagnosis, that would also contribute to the "stench of death". (Or it might, in a different character, inspire compassion rather than revulsion.)
I'm forgetting titles and authors, but I recall reading novels back in the '90s by late-boomer/early-GenX writers who similarly went into considerable and explicit detail about characters who were ultimately not all that interesting, and the effort seemed wasted, since the deep dive into banality didn't seem to serve any higher purpose. That may be why I react to your review as I do.
I've bought the book and have to read it now, but one thought about 'why Japanese':
Japan was the first non-Western country to become rich and export its culture the way America does. (You are seeing this now with South Korea and K-pop and K-dramas). So a lot of nerdy white guys in the 80s and 90s were into Japanese stuff because it was exotic, and then in the 2000s and 2010s a lot of kids in general were into it because there was just a lot of manga and anime available, and some of it was quite good. (I think some of it also catered to teenage boys and young men in a way American popular culture has stopped doing, but there's plenty that doesn't--there's lots of shojo and josei manga as well.)
So I think it may be more 'pop-culture-fantasy-coded' than 'imperialist-coded'. Your average American knows nothing about the (notoriously brutal) Japanese occupation of Korea and attempts to eliminate the Korean language, comfort women in WW2, Unit 731, or the Rape of Nanjing.
Growing up in the 2000s I got a lot of "oh you're Korean? I love anime"-type comments from nerdy dudes (white and black), so I see where you're coming from in terms of what Japan represents for millennials.
In the case of The Sleepers, though, I'm not sure that J-culture export is what's being gestured at with Mariko's ethnic background. Agree that even most educated Americans don't realize Japan was the Nazi Germany of Asia-- there's a tendency to think of Japan as more or less innocent victims because of the whole Hiroshima/Nagasaki thing and the way white liberal guilt works in America. But Matthew Gasda isn't an average American, and I suspect he was being deliberately cheeky by making this character the genetic embodiment of the Axis powers, lol. Despite being a "submissive female Asian body," she is no one-sided victim in the relationship.
Curious to see if you read it the same way.
I responded above. Having read the book, I agree it's not the anime thing. I think, though, it's kind of another rich country here. They don't really seem to be struggling all that much. I agree she's definitely no victim, she's roughly equal in the decaying relationship until Dan goes and cheats (and then, of course, she independently evens the scale).
'Submissive female Asian body' is the way she describes what she thinks Dan thinks of her, but it's not clear he thinks of her that way. If anything he seems to think she holds all the cards, except financial. He seems to be used to that, and seems to be part of the reason he keeps going after Eliza (in addition to the usual midlife crisis).