Gasda’s first novel since his printing-on-the-basement-letterpress-with-his-sister days begins:
Akari decided to walk north along Bedford Avenue instead of switching to
the G train. The fresh air felt good, and it was a beautiful day, so why not?
That “, so why not?” gives us our way in.
Over these last few years, I’ve heard a good number of friends as well as critics decry Gasda’s literary style as “banal realism”—on the one hand, an effort to realize the jouissance of standing in line at the grocer as vaunted by David Foster Wallace in his (in)famous 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, “This is Water.” And on the other, he’s been accused of collapsing full, human experience into stock characters of lame, pejoratively bourgeois drama-memes that exude contempt for its audience’s emotional complexity and intellectual ability.
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