Published: March 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick

In terms of drama, there is really nothing more loaded than a question. Asking a question to get information is one thing; asking a question you already know the answer to is another. Answering a question not asked, or avoiding a question, answering a question with another question, these are all telling conversational tactics, choices that show much more than they pretend to show. A question is essentially a ringing phone; the longer you let it go, the more insistent it gets.

Padgett Powell’s most recent book, “The Interrogative Mood,” is written entirely in questions. Part parlor trick, part spot-lit interview, the book succeeds in keeping your attention because of the inherent tension in the act of asking.

It begins: “Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople?” While you are still trying to feature your position on the potato, you find yourself hurtling towards geography, and for some of us, Constantinople might bring to mind a pinkish spot on an elementary school pull-down map, or a newspaper headline, or a flash of Byzantine mosaic. Part of the action of “The Interrogative Mood” is this parallel ticker tape of answers the reader makes to the questions being fired at her, a list of images, beliefs, opinions and memories as personal and quirky as the questions themselves. How fun, I just kept thinking, and then I’d read some more.

But sooner or later, you have to ask yourself, what is Mr. Powell doing here? Is he assessing you, judging you (because it feels like he’s listening)? Making you nervous or more relaxed? Sometimes the questions are little stories he’s wondering if you will participate in: “If you were part of a couple living in a three-story wooden Victorian house with a bad paint job outside and a shabby interior, to the extent that some of your rooms were lit by bare lightbulbs on swinging cords effecting heavy glare on the beadboard walls, wouldn’t you consider it an appropriate diversion for the two of you to play Norman Bates and his mother at least sometimes?”

Eventually, the narrator asking the questions begins to take shape under them. He repeats himself, circling back to some themes again and again: blue jays, aging, pine needles, the ownership of pets, credit cards, house phones. He asks if you’ve ever seen a large woman making candy check a candy thermometer, only pages later to ask if you realize candy making is the only kind of cooking that requires exact temperatures, and then later still, to offer a kind of memory of touring a candy factory in Desoto, Ga., where tours are no longer allowed “for insurance reasons.” This becomes the story in “The Interrogative Mood,” a kind of loopy encounter with a faceless intellect, bent on plumbing the depths of yours. He asks: “Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Are you curious to know what I’ll do with the answers you’ve given me? Do you think I can make some kind of meaningful ‘profile’ of you? Could you, or someone, do you think make such a profile of me from the questions I have asked you?”

The book seems to dare you to try. When was the last time a book made you want to try anything?