Funny You Should Ask

By JOSH EMMONS

THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

A Novel?

By Padgett Powell

164 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.99

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 every day, you aren’t ready for something as open-ended 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?

Do some questions make all the difference?

Put another way, Powell’s new book is a remarkable collection of philosophical inquiries, stimulating either/ors and good-faith attempts to measure the gap between where we are as a species and where we belong. 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 Ching, “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.

How does it work? By positing theories (“If the observation were made to you that ‘Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met,’ would you be inclined to agree?”) and making jokes (“Is ‘Philosophy by Kant, Bag by Vuitton’ funny?”) and unleashing non sequiturs (“Are you familiar with the viscosities of the various common oils and greases? Have you ever used a torque wrench? Do you have any friends? How much will you spend for a haircut? Do you recall the last time you wept? Is there merit in carpet or is it pretty much a bad idea all around in your view?”) and going into extended hypotheticals (“If we were told that Einstein secretly carries a very small pet in his pocket, would we seek to discover what it is? Do you feel all right? Would you be embarrassed or rather thrilled by yourself if you were caught by Einstein with your hand in his coat pocket? Would you prefer to explain yourself in such a moment to Einstein, to Freud or to Picasso? Are you not past the point of explaining yourself in earnest? Would you like to go to the big new grocery store and marvel at packaging? How have we gotten so stoned, on nothing? Can what we have come to be explained merely by fatigue?”) — all of which reveal the deep seriousness flowing beneath what could (but shouldn’t) be mistaken for the flotsam and jetsam of its author’s mind.

“The Interrogative Mood” demands to be read deliberately, for it is courageous and entertaining and interested in the essential mysteries of self and society. Powell, with his outsize romanticism and urge only to connect, shows that it is through questions rather than answers that truth can, however fleetingly, be glimpsed.

Josh Emmons’s most recent novel is “Prescription for a Superior Existence.” He teaches at Grinnell College.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Emmons-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3