The Interrogative Mood

Padgett Powell's book The Interrogative Mood should be out on bookstore shelves (however virtual that concept has become) around now. I got an "uncorrected proof" copy from ECCO books because they were offering them on Facebook. It is a fantastic book whose genre must I think be defined as "experimental writing" even though Powell is a well known writer of fiction, and there is a temptation to regard the book as a kind of novel. It has some of the extension of a novel, certainly, but its extension revels in the absence of continuity in plot or character, except for that of the reader who receives the questions of which the book is made. I could argue for its being a long prose poem as well. In any case, part of what's fantastic about the book is its "readability," the fact that one can sit with its sequence of non sequiturs and find oneself always asking always for more. The number of themes that get addressed at least in passing over the course of the book is enormous, but I particularly enjoyed the recurring theme of nostalgia for a variety of twentieth century landscapes, and the related one of being asked over and over to decide whether to exchange one's current existence for another (hypothetical and impossible, but somehow conceivable) one. Everyone should try reading this book.