Lucid Dreamer

“Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, I was not there.” These words by the medieval writer John Mandeville, quoted by Welsh poet David Jones in the preface to his World War I memoir in verse, In Parenthesis, suggest themselves equally as a motto for The Sleepers, the new novel by playwright and critic Matthew Gasda, author of Dimes Square and Doomers. The novel’s setting is another strange “parenthesis” of time: not war (although some of Gasda’s metaphors will suggest otherwise) but the eve of what was expected to be Hillary Clinton’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, in not-quite-trendy Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It is autumn in the less than belle époque of Millennial socialism, and the leaves are, as if in sympathy, “simply dying: falling off the branch, half-green, in unusual late September heat.”