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Review: The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno [Books]
As it turns out, quite well. Meno captures the mood of a specific time, the angry, frightened fall before the 2004 presidential election, when America seemed increasingly impossible to reason with. Each member of the Caspar family has his or her own specific fear or hang-up. Amelia, the teenage revolutionary, is on a crusade to end bourgeois complacency at her school newspaper but doesn’t quite have the nerve to follow through on her plans. Thisbe, the born-again high school freshman, is afraid of God’s wrath when she kisses a girl, then more afraid of His absence when no fist comes down from the sky to smite her. Madeline, the mother, is disturbed by the sadistic behavior of the pigeons she studies in her lab. And Jonathan, the father, is afraid of everything—his feelings, his academic rivals, looking like a failure in front of his family, and, most of all, clouds. Every time he looks at one for too long, he has a sort of half panic attack, half epileptic fit.
There are a lot of clouds in The Great Perhaps, but the biggest cloud hanging over the Caspar family is the threat of divorce. That’s also the book’s emotional core. The natural assurances of family have fallen apart, resulting in some touching, tender scenes:
“She knocks loudly on her parents’ bedroom door, calling her mother’s name, but no one answers. She gives the doorknob a turn, but finds it is locked. Why would her mother lock it? What’s going on in there? What’s her mother so afraid of, anyway? Thisbe knocks once more and then begins to walk away, unsure of why her mother won’t answer. She sits silently beside her parents’ door for an hour or two, then gets tired, and wanders off towards her room.”
It’s not surprising that Meno is also a playwright—his instinct is to allow each character’s reality to exist separately, then find drama and meaning in the resonance between those independently experienced realities as the characters interact. The most hilarious scenes occur in each family member’s life outside the house (Jonathan’s epic failures to lead a lecture, Amelia’s attempt to make an anti-capitalist documentary, the grandfather Henry’s plot to escape his nursing home), but the most touching moments occur when the characters are forced to recognize each other and try to see eye to eye.
Meno’s characters are all well-drawn and pleasantly distinct, but each on seem to travel along an upside-down arc of development, through disappointment (more than action) as a means to self-knowledge. For the reader, it’s an unusual way to move through a book—always expecting something to happen, but never quite getting the satisfaction of seeing the adventure through. The more one thinks about it, however, the more interesting Meno’s approach becomes. That isn’t to say that he never gets sidetracked—his digressions into the grandfather’s back-story can get a bit long-winded—but his aim is true. That fall of 2004, in retrospect, now seems like an unpleasant cul-de-sac, a turn down a bad road that we had the good sense to get off of, hopefully in time. We can be proud of ourselves to the extent that we didn’t let ourselves give in to fear or anger, and to the extent that we kept our best efforts focused on the “astonishing and quite ordinary” lives of the people closest to us.
