THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD
THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD
By Padgett Powell
Does The Interrogative Mood sound like a C.I.A. agent’s whimsical memoir, an epistemological study, a grammar guide, a dating primer or a book that playfully and provocatively asks so many questions - funny, sad, informative, rhetorical, prurient, maudlin, political and absurd questions - that under its spell you’ll more clearly envision a better world while valuing no less intensely the flawed, fractured, fast-forward one you’re in?
If I said that The Interrogative Mood, the fifth novel by Padgett Powell, was that kind of book, and a captivating and often glorious reading experience, and if you believed me, would you get a copy soon, or would you decide that even though captivating, often glorious books don’t come along Âevery day, you aren’t ready for something as open-Âended and seemingly uncertain as this? If, then, I assured you that embedded in its all-question format are ideas and images and emotions uniquely and powerfully expressed, and that it is a great-hearted assault on ambivalence, would you realize that you are ready?
It is nothing like his “Edisto,” “Edisto Revisited” or “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men,” fictions of some lyrical force that suffered from rickety characters and unmoored plots, but instead a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te ÂChing, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées, Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.
Would you be embarrassed or rather thrilled by yourself if you were caught by Einstein with your hand in his coat pocket?
“The Interrogative Mood” demands to be read deliberately, for it is courageous and entertaining and interested in the essential mysteries of self and society. You could have the book here.
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