You could read this book about three hundred times and not get bored.
“Are you given comfort or made nervous by ball bearings?… Do you tolerate speech impediments in newscasters?… Is there any hope? Do we need galoshes?… If there is life after death, would you think one should prepare in any way or does it conversely mean that no preparations whatsoever are in order?” Yep, this is Padget Powell’s novel written entirely in questions. In concept, it seems both clever and gimmicky. On paper, it disturbs, delights, makes you nostalgic for things way back in your past, startles you with its continuity and form, and drives you into the areas of your brain where you’re most afraid to go. Maybe it’s a little gimmicky. It’s also genius.
The Interrogative Mood sets itself up as a dialogue, although the narrator can’t hear your answers. But by the end, or even towards the middle of one hundred and sixty-four pages of questions, you kind of think the narrator can hear your answers — or at least knows who you are. This is creepier than I can really make it sound. The questions aren’t entirely arbitrary. Often a (seemingly) serious question is asked back-to-back with a (seemingly) frivolous one, as in “If right now you were on your deathbed but not feling too bad, and could have some one thing brought to you, what would it be? Do you like flannel?” Powell’s narrator will stay for a paragraph or so on easily mined topics, like your first sexual encounter. He asks every kind of opinion on every kind of animal. He repeats the theme of hearing the ice cream truck and scrambling under the couch cushions for loose change. It’s like the best and most random collection of obscure celebrity interviews you’ve ever read.
I was sucked in by the charm of the narrator. He’s very gracious. He asks your forgiveness if he repeats himself, and gives the impression that he won’t judge you no matter what you respond. You can picture him in his armchair, pulling from his gallery of first-date questions and worst-case scenarios and scientific facts, recalling his life in its odd and lovely phenomena (you guys, remember Tab? remember boomerangs? remember pancakes with real maple syrup on them?), and welcoming you to make difficult choices, while daring you to defend them (“Was your father a bastard outright, a medium bastard, or a light bastard? Was your mother a saint?”) He uses sentences as long as my own. But Powell has mastered the twisting, long-road sentence, and you admire his verbal construction even as you wonder how such bizarre hypotheticals can exist in his head, and your head, and all of our heads, at the same time.
For instance: “What would it mean if you dreamed you found two baby squirrels and asked two women if they knew a good baby-squirrel formula and when you fetched the squirrels you found they had drowned because you had inexplicably iced them down, and the ice had melted, and now the baby squirrels were sodden gray puppy-looking short-haired turds in a foul juice, and you broke down crying in front of the women, asking, ‘Why would I have iced them?'” I don’t know what that sentence did to your brain, but it did something. Something on the “what-the-fuck” to “awesome” spectrum. Some old thing in your imagination’s gut, the gut-place you read books from when you were a kid. The place to which you’re always surprised to return.
