The Interrogative Mood
A Novel?
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”
—Richard Ford
The Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as “one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too.” A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace’s stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, “will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn’t, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powell (Mrs. Hollinsworth's Men) is in playfully provocative, top form in this slender book fashioned solely as a series of questions beginning with his limpid first: "Are your emotions pure?" and ending with his prickly last: "Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind?" Thoughtful, cajoling and absurdist, Powell's random non sequiturs are not without their method, sounding some tenderly recurring themes, such as a middle-aged ruefulness for simpler times, a longing for more elegant forms in clothes, tools, cars and looks and a tenderness for elephants, dogs and children. At moments the questions become self-revelatory, as if the narrator is interviewing for a partner or friend ("Would you believe me if I tell you that I am a little fragile, psychologically speaking...?"), while also challenging the reader with pointed questions regarding ethical gravitas: "Are you bothered by your cowardice?" Hilarity, irony, and sheer perverseness vie to question essentially what we know and how what we know makes us what we are.
