The sun is going to be all over the place this weekend, and, despite the fact the fish are suffering, warm water means fine swimming for us people. So chances are good that you’ll want to trundle on down to the beach with a canvas tote full of berries, leftover Brie, a sweet blanket, and, most importantly, something to read.
But reading at the beach is such a fraught activity! It can be impossible: the book too fat, the wind too windy, the surrounding friends too gossipy, the water too enticing, or the body too sleepy. But The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, by Southern weirdo-genius and award-winning author Padgett Powell, solves a lot of these problems. (Powell says the idea for the novel came from a passive-aggressive e-mail from one of his colleagues, hilariously described here.)
When Powell published his debut novel, Edisto, everyone thought he was going to be the next Flannery Faulkner Capote. But his books kept getting increasingly strange until finally critics just threw up their hands and left him to teach down in Florida with the rest of the hallimahgatahs. Aside from Harper Lee, I think he’s our best living Southern writer. He’s got Beckett’s worldview and Faulkner’s ear, both of which are apparent in The Interrogative Mood.
In the book, Powell asks one question after another. Some of the questions are related to the one before them, most of them seem to be non sequiturs, and a few key ones return to certain themes that hold the whole thing together and prevent it from becoming a gimmicky coffee table book.
As is the case with a lot of his recent work, Powell selects cowardice, impotent desire, and the slow decline of all things as the book’s central themes. (If these aren’t beach themes to you, then go be 100 percent comfortable with your own body somewhere else.) As is also the case with Powell, he’s able to sneak these mopey ideas into absurd-sounding, funny sentences that make you want to read them aloud in a fake Southern drawl.
Take this small excerpt, for example:
How much time have you spent in a deer stand? Are you attracted to sausage (and to the idea of sausage), or are you repulsed by it, or are you sausage neutral? Will you get on a bus in a foreign city in which you do not speak the language? Do you wear slippers? A robe?
If you relax your eyes a little and pause before the big jumps in logic, then you can see that these questions, while seemingly random, speak to one of Powell’s main concerns, one that’s also central to a day at the beach: “How comfortable are you with unmediated experiences of life?”
Robes and slippers protect us from the world, as do language and deer stands. Based on the fact that Powell presents more mediated than unmediated experiences here, you get the sense that he isn’t a man who wants to see how the sausage gets made; he’d like sunscreen, please, and a white T-shirt.
If you go the beach alone, your personal, emotional response to each question fills in the logical gaps between them, and so your identity ends up swirling with Powell’s in a platonic, sausage-neutral way. This effect can dispel the loneliness you might feel when you notice a bunch of tan people laughing and telling jokes and actually living life instead of reading about it. Plus, Powell is at times so pathetic that he will make you feel like you’re not the ugliest lump on the beach.
The book is also good for group beach-going because it solves one of the central tensions of that venture. If you’re neurotic as I am, it can feel rude to open up a book and start reading while in the company of people, trees, and glistening water that you haven’t seen all week. But you can make a kind of game with this book: a Magic 8 Ball sort of deal, or a round of 20 Very Weird Questions. Almost every sentence lends itself to opening the book, turning to the friend lying beside you, the one sipping from her deuce-deuce of light lager, and saying, “If a tornado is a torrent of wind, is a hurricane a horrent of wind?”
