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.

This Friday

A double-bill of academic wizardry (or downright dilletantism). Me and Derek are giving papers at the work-in-progess seminars in the English Literature department. Either number 4 or 5 Uni Gardens, can't remember. 1pm.

Derek's paper is called something like "Chasing Rainbows and Granite with Virginia Woolf" (Derek, if you read this, please correct me!) and takes up that famous quote in relation to sexual difference. Mine's called "The Problem of the Contemporary: The Altermodern and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland" and will be the finest 2000 words of my longer piece for the Aberdeen publication next year.

A Little Thought About David Mitchell

By rights I shouldn't like David Mitchell. His writing is slightly cyber-punky, Matrix-y and Bladerunner-y; all things I steer pretty well clear of. Whilst not overly elaborate it's not spare - fast becoming my favourite writing style - either. It's punchy and quick and he weaves a good yarn. Now yarnin', as Zachry in Cloud Atlas calls storytelling, is something I do like. And it's probably what makes me like him as much as I do. He has a similar storytelling prowess to Haruki Murakami and weaves in and out of reality much like him. (I'm too ignorant to say whether it's the Japanese connection - Mitchell lived and taught in Tokyo for many years). That not-sparse prose is given to occasional flourishes but not exaggerated ones. It is calm and somewhat measured but reveals a joy of the wriggliness of language too.