The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?

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.