The Interrogative Mood

I finished Padgett Powell's novel (?) The Interrogative Mood the other day. It's rather good, and I'll definitely use it in my PhD, (if the bloody application gets in, but that's a whole other story).



It's constructed entirely out of questions, 165 pages of them, divided not into chapters but roughly 10-page sections. There's no ostensible order to the questions (no theme ties together each section for instance), and they range in style and content from "Do you like paint?" to "Is there a future?" - those two appear right next to each other.

For the first ten or twenty pages, you're figuring out how you're going to read it; the rhythm, the pace, the emphases. The more you read, the more you find your way, and the more you build up a head of steam. You start noticing how the construction and placement of the questions means that you don't read it as a mere interrogative list, that each question has a different tone or timbre to it. Powell mixes it up.

Then you start noticing how questions re-appear in slightly different formations. But they're not "big themes", they're about your love of blue-jays, the fear of a hernia, the comparative beauties of a sunset and a sunrise, whether little rubber army men are still made as toys. They're the type of questions that "characterise", and you begin to wonder about the identity of the questioner. They're the apparently small things that an individual notices or is preoccupied with, and it's in this sense that Powell is very much like Nicholson Baker, (who's new book I'm currently reading). Like Baker, Powell loves those idiosyncracies - "Are you a sweater person?" "Do you take pleasure in cleaning and repacking wheel bearings?" - that always seem to 'say so much' about a person.

This questioner keeps formulating escape plans ("If you were told you could move to a cabin in the Andes, yours for the taking and with some servants on the grounds ready to work for you and that the farm was self-sufficient with their labour, would you go?") and you wonder whether these questions are a self-questioning, some sort of examination. Perhaps this book is an (auto-)biography of sorts, all the questions one asks oneself put together. But perhaps it's not a biography of a person per se, but a psyche, a society, a country even, and perhaps it's not a biography in the sense of a linear narrative from birth to death but a biography in a portrait, a snapshot, and perhaps that snapshot is of contemporary America. I think it is.