Issue 44 / May 2012
Is it a story? Is it fiction? Is there a plot? Is it even a novel?
Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make your more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to the last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle? Does your doorbell ever ring?
So begins The Interrogative Mood, A Novel?, a seemingly random but infinitely artful series of questions that make up Padgett Powell's small masterpiece. Untitled caught up with the author to get an insight into his career to date, and discover what led him to write such an individualistic and idiosyncratic book. But he mostly wanted to talk about Pete Dexter.
On April 11, 1983, Time magazine reviewed five first novels. Among them were mine and Pete Dexter's. Time also ran photographs of the hopeful authors. My photographer had been a student of Walker Evans. He came with a Hasselblad and a wide-angle lens. He positioned me in the back yard under a fallen tree beside my dog. He made me look like James Agee, as Walker Evans had made James Agee look like James Agee. My dog was so handsome that I looked handsome beside him. I looked like a handsome boy who had fallen out of a tree having written a good book and who had a good dog. The photo ran in colour.
Beside me Pete Dexter sat on a desk in what looked like a city room for a newspaper, which it probably was. His photographer had crowded him onto the desk making him virtually sit on his keyboard. Pete Dexter was slumped and did not look too hopeful. His dog was not with him. His photo was in black and white.
My review was the lead review. It started right under my colourful Let Us Now Praise Famous Men effeteness camouflaged by brutal storm damage and brutal muscular dog, and you had to read all of it before you even got to slumping black-and-white dogless Pete's review. I had it all over this Pete Dexter.
My book became a cult elite literary New-Yorker-excerpted splash. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Pete's book disappeared in a second, at least it did in my mind, for I was Sarah Palin headed out of Alaska, buddyro. It should have disappeared - he did not look like James Agee and he had no dog. He looked like a writer for God's sake. He was in an office and I was in a tree. My book lost the National Book Award.
When my second book was reviewed with left-handed complimentariness in the New York Times, I got a letter from Pete Dexter that offered to go to California and beat up the reviewer. "What is a Coraghessan?" he wrote. He also sent me his second book. I did not read it.
When my third book came out, as I disappeared off the plank of that publisher and sank with the book, Pete's third book won the National Book Award. I sensed that we had begun to maybe change positions. I began to read his books, and the light from them began to shine down into the hole of obscurity in which I lay.
And so it went, and as good old Vonnegut used to put it, so it goes. As the brave men of letters who once tried to boost me have died, Percy and Barthelme and Bellow, my publishers have gotten Pete to write the blurbs, all of them. If he writes "the best first novel I have ever read" for me, they get him to change it to "the best novel I have ever read." And Pete is so polite, and so shocked, that he will let them do something like this, unless they listen to me when I ask them not to, which is unlikely.
So what accounts for bottom man on top now, as one of Ms Palin's inexperienced Republican predecessors put it (A. Lincoln)? Why does the light shine down like this? Why must I look up even if it hurts my eyes? There are three reasons. I will tell you them now.
1. Pete Dexter was in fact a newspaper man, so when he came to writing novels he did not puff up. He already knew how to puff down.
2. Every sentence he writes has the vast and limited object of expressing the correct sentiment and significance of the moment. He writes these sentences, not stories or novels. That they link up necessarily, inevitably, ineluctably - to use a puffed-up word a literary effete would quickly deploy, hands off the handlebars! - is something he cannot prevent.
3. These sentences are never very far from matters of life and death. When matters of life and death are to hand, and when they are not lugubrious, as they will be if the sentiment and significance of the moment is not correct, the result is frightening.
By setting out The Interrogative Mood as a series of questions (as the effete reader will have surmised), there is not a single sentence in Powell's new book. May comparisons with Dexter now cease?
Padgett Powell teaches writing at the University of Florida. The Interrogative Mood is published by Profile.
Wednesday, 24 November, 2010
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