Sleeping Through Life

Two chapters into Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, Mariko, a waitress and stage actress, gets into a spat with her boyfriend, Dan, a Marxist English professor and would-be public intellectual. As she chides him for failing “to see things from my perspective,” she spots her phone on the table. “It occurred to her that it would make her feel better, even for perverse reasons. She felt little tremors of pleasure just thinking about it.” Soon, tuning him out, she has picked up the phone and begun to scroll.