October 13th, 2009 / 5:42 pm
I Like __ A Lot

“Have you ever been bitten by a blue jay?”

Imagine yourself for a moment a laundry basket. A duffel bag of laundry, a black trash bag of laundry. Whatever. You’re one. Is there not, in the terrifying accumulation of our lives, a distinction between giving yourself away and asking to try someone on? Let’s say I ask if you’re okay. If you’re much pleasured by the current sky. Curried rice. Jim Carrey or ice cream. In so asking I’m digging in, hand in your basket, to take and pull a little cloth of yourself over a naked me-bit. Which is not always aggressive. Sometimes you do want me to ask you things; sometimes you’d rather I didn’t. I don’t want to talk about 2009, Facebook surveys, Michael Bloomberg’s polling strategies, focus groups for salsa commercials. It’s all relevant, but what I most want to say about Padgett Powell’s eye-twist of a novel (and I mean novel, like damn that’s novel) The Interrogative Mood is that its one-hundred-sixty-four pages of questions and question marks remind me that I am afraid of people, in love with people, hungry to know people, and made (bye laundry metaphor) mostly to be dispensed: what I mean is all that water.


A whole book of just questions isn’t a new idea. One example I know for sure is Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris, a thirty-page section of his larger work Age of Huts. And Modernism and Oulipo probably thought of doing this, somebody in those huts, and somebody was probably audacious enough to actually do it, which is of course more interesting than thinking of doing it. What’s great about Powell’s The Interrogative Mood is that it’s more interesting than even doing it. Because where Sunset Debris explores the idea of question as social contract, syntax as power, blah blah, The Interrogative Mood swashbuckingly forgoes thinking too much about its own project and simply tries to think of the most interesting and poignant questions it can. Over and over again. For 164 pages. And it works. Here is the first paragraph:

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If you before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

What makes The Interrogative Mood more than a great exercise in sentence rhythm or a manic party game is that it’s 1) more emotional than intellectual and 2) restless as hell. Like, legitimately curious. Because curious is a feeling, right? Not a state of mind? And questions give us: secrets, sharing, trivia, memory melding, pressure on the imagination, philosophic dialogue, and what Jakobson called the “phatic function of language,” that perpetual tapping of the microphone that uses language just to ask if we’re being heard, if we’re coming across. Also, as you can tell from the excerpt, this book’s secret velocity is that it’s really noun-y, full of funny and surprising shit. So if you don’t want to worry about what a gambit the project is, you can just be taken by the voice, which is happy to entertain.

Powell’s other books (Typical and Edisto are two good ones) are feasts of language and feeling, but this book feels like his most ambitious thus far because it feels like a thing someone really wants to do. Like sometimes we don’t want to tell a story. Sometimes we don’t want to make a witty linguistic construction. Sometimes we want to ask people questions, that’s all, like Goddamn, are you out there, are you okay—and it’s a feat of what I’m going to go ahead and call with a totally straight face Artistic Integrity to realize this need and to realize it in the form of a lonely and brilliant satellite of lifted-tone sentences, which Powell does in The Interrogative Mood. Here’s an answer for you: you want it, yeah.

44 Comments

  1. chelsea martin

      whats it about

  2. chelsea martin

      whats it about

  3. Mike Young

      sex and pie

  4. Mike Young

      sex and pie

  5. KevinS

      Holy crap. I didn’t even know about this. And it looks like we have a used one in the store already (shows you how popular Padgett is sadly). I better go downstairs and grab it off the shelf now!
      And Mike–I’m sure you’re a sensible dude, but I don’t think it will beat either Edisto or Typical. Only history will tell, I guess.

  6. KevinS

      Holy crap. I didn’t even know about this. And it looks like we have a used one in the store already (shows you how popular Padgett is sadly). I better go downstairs and grab it off the shelf now!
      And Mike–I’m sure you’re a sensible dude, but I don’t think it will beat either Edisto or Typical. Only history will tell, I guess.

  7. Mike Young

      yeah, i guess i never really meant “best” but rather “most ambitious”

  8. Mike Young

      yeah, i guess i never really meant “best” but rather “most ambitious”

  9. claire

      when you say ‘history will tell,’ what exactly are you saying? who, or what, are the judgment makers that decide which novels get included in the big greats of literary history? i’m only asking for your opinion, i don’t have an answer myself.

  10. claire

      when you say ‘history will tell,’ what exactly are you saying? who, or what, are the judgment makers that decide which novels get included in the big greats of literary history? i’m only asking for your opinion, i don’t have an answer myself.

  11. jensen

      thanks for posting, mike. i saw this other day and thought about buying it. good to know it’s good. how was that for a non-committal kind of sentence. typical and edisto are two favorites over here so i’m looking forward to this one too.

  12. jensen

      thanks for posting, mike. i saw this other day and thought about buying it. good to know it’s good. how was that for a non-committal kind of sentence. typical and edisto are two favorites over here so i’m looking forward to this one too.

  13. michael bible

      just saw him read in down here in mississippi. he read on our local radio show and was a huge hit. the book is killer. interesting how some questions are over-the-top funny and others quite sad. reminded me of beckett in that way. typical is a masterpiece but i prefer ‘edisto revisited’ to plain old ‘edisto.’ sometimes the sequel is better than the original, i say.

  14. michael bible

      just saw him read in down here in mississippi. he read on our local radio show and was a huge hit. the book is killer. interesting how some questions are over-the-top funny and others quite sad. reminded me of beckett in that way. typical is a masterpiece but i prefer ‘edisto revisited’ to plain old ‘edisto.’ sometimes the sequel is better than the original, i say.

  15. MoGa

      boo, where did cowboy beans go?

  16. MoGa

      boo, where did cowboy beans go?

  17. gabe

      Cool! Nice recommendation. This sounds up my alley. I’ve been meaning to try him again after Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, which was not so hot.

  18. gabe

      Cool! Nice recommendation. This sounds up my alley. I’ve been meaning to try him again after Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, which was not so hot.

  19. Catherine Lacey

      review, like damn that’s a review

  20. Catherine Lacey

      review, like damn that’s a review

  21. Mike Young

      realized they were annoyingly self-indulgent, deleted ’em

  22. Mike Young

      realized they were annoyingly self-indulgent, deleted ’em

  23. Mike Young

      weird that that’s the one you started with!

  24. Mike Young

      weird that that’s the one you started with!

  25. Christopher Higgs

      Thanks for posting about this, Mike — it looks like fun. I’m gonna check it out.

      If folks are interested in this concept, Gilbert Sorrentino also did one (a book comprised of questions) called Gold Fools. Also William Walsh’s Questionstruck.

      I’m thinking there could be a pretty interesting paper to be written about this subgenre: the interrogative novel. Hmmmm…

  26. Christopher Higgs

      Thanks for posting about this, Mike — it looks like fun. I’m gonna check it out.

      If folks are interested in this concept, Gilbert Sorrentino also did one (a book comprised of questions) called Gold Fools. Also William Walsh’s Questionstruck.

      I’m thinking there could be a pretty interesting paper to be written about this subgenre: the interrogative novel. Hmmmm…

  27. Mike Young

      oh yeah, i didn’t think about Questionstruck because i’d thought of that as more of an erasure.. didn’t know about the sorrentino book

      are there others that people know about?

  28. Mike Young

      oh yeah, i didn’t think about Questionstruck because i’d thought of that as more of an erasure.. didn’t know about the sorrentino book

      are there others that people know about?

  29. 10CC

      The Interrogation by Pinget.

  30. 10CC

      The Interrogation by Pinget.

  31. KevinS

      Oh, I just mean that Edisto (in particular) has already placed itself as a sort of contemporary classic (perhaps overlooked). I realize public opinion and personal opinion are different things though. Maybe Mike’s personal opinion thinks this is his best, whereas public opinion (or whoever writes Powell’s obit in a few decades) will probably point out Edisto as his big moment.

  32. KevinS

      Oh, I just mean that Edisto (in particular) has already placed itself as a sort of contemporary classic (perhaps overlooked). I realize public opinion and personal opinion are different things though. Maybe Mike’s personal opinion thinks this is his best, whereas public opinion (or whoever writes Powell’s obit in a few decades) will probably point out Edisto as his big moment.

  33. jeff t johnson

      are you out there, are you okay

      love that bit. always nice to read you, mike.

  34. jeff t johnson

      are you out there, are you okay

      love that bit. always nice to read you, mike.

  35. michael james

      yes sir. i peaked inside it via amazon and yes, i will buy it. though not from amazon.

  36. michael james

      yes sir. i peaked inside it via amazon and yes, i will buy it. though not from amazon.

  37. mike young

      thanks jeff =)

  38. mike young

      thanks jeff =)

  39. mike young

      harpers is the cool dad

  40. mike young

      harpers is the cool dad

  41. mike young

      yeah this is like the perfect book for the radio

  42. mike young

      thanks catherine =)

  43. mike young

      yeah this is like the perfect book for the radio

  44. mike young

      thanks catherine =)