“You are incoherent, almost,” one of the unnamed speakers in Padgett Powell’s You & Me blurts out at one point. It’s just one of many apt observations in this book of meandering dialogue. Echoing the stripped-down, conversation-driven absurdist approach of Waiting for Godot, Powell’s latest work features two dueling voices trading stories, reminiscences, and half-plotted theories about just about everything. Haircuts, malaria, Jayne Mansfield, literary theory, flying dogs, Juicy Fruit, Gila monsters, suicide, Crazy Horse, Joe DiMaggio, geopolitics, Lucille Ball—nothing is off limits. But nothing is all that important, either. As Powell put it in a recent interview, “They're really tame. I don't think they ever go to the store and get liquor. These are polite, tired old men.” As such, it’s hard to locate anything like a raison d'être from You & Me’s mishmash of epigrams, cultural references, and propositions—which, perhaps, is the point. Why can’t conversation, in all its sloppy humanity, be enough? “If we could sit in these chairs unperturbed while everything was taken and have nothing then around us but the air we breathe a thought or two, and our monkey chitchat, we would somehow be very superior,” one voice suggests. “I think you are having a monastery vision,” comes the reply. And then, the first again: “Maybe I am.”

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