Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood ****

This book is composed entirely of questions. You know how you'll sometimes get an email message where even the positive assertions are in the form of a question?

How can I describe the experience of reading this book? It doesn't tell a story. Although you can detect patterns in the types of questions that the narrator asks, they are not enough to create a full character. Nonetheless, I was delighted by the experience, especially by the oddball specificity of many of them.

If you yourself are not a coward, do you look upon a coward with sympathy or with disgust? If you yourself are not a murderer, do you look upon a murderer with disgust or sympathy? Why have I altered the position of "sympathy and disgust" and "disgust and sympathy" so? Did you ever try to raise two flying squirrels by getting up every three hours and feeding them cow's milk and stimulating their genitals with a tissue to get them to pee as your mother instructed you and seeing them die three weeks later of fever and bloat and fecal poisoning because the cow's milk had so constipated them that they had not, in all that peeing, ever pooped? And did you wonder later how your mother would know to stimulate them to pee but not that cow's milk would cement them up like that?

I was fascinated by how I actually did have opinions about some of the crazy things he asked about. ("Would you rather be trapped in a closet with a large cat or an anaconda?") Could I perhaps learn something significant about myself by analyzing my answers?