You & Me
A Novel
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3.9 • 20 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Padgett Powell, author of the acclaimed The Interrogative Mood and “one of the few truly important American writers of our time” (Sam Lipsyte), returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot.
Truly a master of envelope-pushing, post-postmodern American fiction, in a class with Nicholas Baker and Lydia Davis, Powell brilliantly blends the sublime, the trivial, and the oddball in You & Me, as two loquacious gents on a porch discuss all manner of subjects, from the mundane to the spiritual to the downright ridiculous.
At once outrageously funny and profound, You & Me is yet another brilliant, boundary-bursting masterwork, proving once again that, “there are few writers who understand both the beauty and the absurdity of language as well as Padgett Powell” (Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang) and that, “Padgett Powell is one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too” (Ian Frazier).
You & Me: A Novel won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powell (The Interrogative Mood) asks what happens to a novel when it's stripped of exposition, setting, and plot. What remains is dialogue, the sort of ribald dialogue that Barry Hannah's liars might cast out over the water, pining for sex, drink, and some answers. Here, two old nameless "weirdly agreeable dudes" talk in circles about suicide, childhood, and split-shot fishing weights, and wonder aloud if they might go to the "liquor bunker" or "go down to the creek and stare Despair down" in their "not upscale neighborhood." They're nearly as funny as Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon an inevitable comparison for a duo who point out the word "action" is not even a verb. But Beckett's characters are played by real men who move about a stage and fight with other players and wait with purpose. Our dime-store philosophers wait for no one but themselves "to engage the world bravely" and become men. No one arrives not Pozzo, or Lucky, or even a messenger yet the novel's penetrating, playful words manage to "pick impossibly heavy shit up" and deliver what one of the characters calls "the perfect nonsense a real dream makes."
