There Is No I in Us

What kind of novel is 69, 70? It is a wheezing, unwieldy, overextended splatter-wall of a novel, a pseudo-subliminal psychological thriller of the introspective-mumblecore persuasion, an endlessly digressive ode to the endlessly digressive motion and stasis of the human mind. It is an homage to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) without any identifiable scene work, to Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963) without any lightness of heart, to Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (1978) without very much rigor or discipline. It is, perhaps, the great American road novel as imagined by a symbiotic pair of Croatians, one that would seem to have been composed both inductively, from a handful of slightly surrealistic sketches that finally amount to nothing, and deductively, from a handful of deeply felt conclusions about the nature of loss and loneliness and identity and interdependence. It is a reckless novel, and also a poignantly true one for those of us who may be into this sort of thing.

69, 70 is a wheezing, unwieldy, overextended splatter-wall of a novel.

There is a plot, such as it is, which occasionally gains momentum or closure only in a footnote, that recounts the hits and misses of an anonymously foreign, aimlessly nomadic, parasitically interdependent couple hell-bent on exploring their duality through the tag-team seduction of a third party. This they fail to achieve here and there, have achieved for them in a thrice-repeated and possibly imagined rape scene, and finally achieve with a man named Kain, whose presence further complicates everything, not least the novel’s use of pronouns, by an order of magnitude. (We know Kain is a pawn in the story because he is given a name.) There is a run of careful-what-you-wish-for perversity that ensues when the accommodation of a third splits the couple into its constituent he and she, but the moral behind it is not clear beyond the inevitable solitude of couplehood, the desperate self-abnegation in the need to conjoin. There is an admission, late in the book, of “the onanistic quality of literature where the particular point gets illustrated by three people coupling, only one of them inhabited by the reader.”

It is a messily self-aware novel, to say the least, and more than a fair share of it is given over to vaguely winking, quasi-Socratic exchanges on the nature of individuality and ego, sometimes invoking the reader directly, more often shooting him a passive-aggressive come-hither glare. These exchanges are easily the least interesting part of the book, but they do constitute a sort of frame in which the narrators can lay their selves bare by way of impressionistic poem-prose, headless footnotes formatted as journal entries dated by the French revolutionary calendar, academic moralizations of increasingly joyless sexual encounters. (“Tolerance must be distributed on the tip of an erect penis, it is a magic wand that magically transforms every orifice into a maudlin maw,” for one; “our wild menstruations and eerie hemorrhoids keep us on a tight rein a short leash of corporality,” for another.)

Followed at the level of the sentence or the vignette, these purgations are mostly too dense and unrelenting to give breathing room to the novel’s best insights, which can be glimpses into the negotiations and vulnerabilities that come with sharing one’s self (“no matter how much people are scared of being alone, they are even more scared of not being”) but are more often disarmingly earthbound, candidly detailed portraits of single-use characters—which prove, somehow, how much easier it can be to train a steady lens of fascination or desire on a stranger than it is to fully know the person one has made a lifelong project of becoming one with. (This is, for what it’s worth, as close to a thesis as 69, 70 comes.)

It is only from a certain remove that the novel presents a solid case...