In the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election, the Caspers are a family in decline, each member watching helplessly as the ties that bind them unravel despite utter devotion to the simple tenets they believe will save them. In The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno dashes the efficacy of simple answers with a story woven together in intricately structured five part harmony, each part with its own distinct voice.
Jonathan
Jonathan Casper suffers from a highly unusual malady which causes him to faint at the sight of a cloud. It's a condition which has plagued him since childhood, when doctors first prescribed anti-seizure medication for "the boy who feared the sky," allowing Jonathan to lead a semi-normal life. In spite of this cure, Jonathan has grown into a bookish and sedentary middle age that he prefers to spend indoors, ensconced in scientific research of another creature with an equally distant relationship to the sky, the giant squid. At the expense of his family, Jonathan has devoted the past 15 years of his life to the pursuit of this elusive deap sea behemoth and is currently blind to the imminent danger he is in of losing those closest to him.
Jonathan
Jonathan Casper suffers from a highly unusual malady which causes him to faint at the sight of a cloud. It's a condition which has plagued him since childhood, when doctors first prescribed anti-seizure medication for "the boy who feared the sky," allowing Jonathan to lead a semi-normal life. In spite of this cure, Jonathan has grown into a bookish and sedentary middle age that he prefers to spend indoors, ensconced in scientific research of another creature with an equally distant relationship to the sky, the giant squid. At the expense of his family, Jonathan has devoted the past 15 years of his life to the pursuit of this elusive deap sea behemoth and is currently blind to the imminent danger he is in of losing those closest to him.
Madeline
Madeline is the glue that still tenuously binds the Caspers together. She cares for her husband Jonathan, who has become unable to care for himself, and she is the only parent who is even marginally tuned into the lives of their teenage daughters, Thisbe and Amelia. Madeline, like her husband, works at the University of Chicago where she is an avian researcher, though she fears she is not such a good one. She has recently begun to anthropomorphize the pigeons in her research group, bestowing upon them names and distinct personalities. In her mind, she likens her dominant male pigeons to "smug little right-wing assholes, ruling the rest of the coop with physical intimidation, cruelty, and terror."
Amelia
Amelia, at seventeen, has declared herself a Marxist. She dresses in Che Guevara and Malcolm X t-shirts and writes scalding diatrbes against capitalism in her school newspaper. Amelia rages unthinkingly against the machine however she can imagine. She only listens to French pop music, and she refuses to shave her armpits or legs. Amelia is insulted by the very existence of Starbucks; she wears a black beret.
Madeline is the glue that still tenuously binds the Caspers together. She cares for her husband Jonathan, who has become unable to care for himself, and she is the only parent who is even marginally tuned into the lives of their teenage daughters, Thisbe and Amelia. Madeline, like her husband, works at the University of Chicago where she is an avian researcher, though she fears she is not such a good one. She has recently begun to anthropomorphize the pigeons in her research group, bestowing upon them names and distinct personalities. In her mind, she likens her dominant male pigeons to "smug little right-wing assholes, ruling the rest of the coop with physical intimidation, cruelty, and terror."
Amelia
Amelia, at seventeen, has declared herself a Marxist. She dresses in Che Guevara and Malcolm X t-shirts and writes scalding diatrbes against capitalism in her school newspaper. Amelia rages unthinkingly against the machine however she can imagine. She only listens to French pop music, and she refuses to shave her armpits or legs. Amelia is insulted by the very existence of Starbucks; she wears a black beret.
Thisbe
Thisbe could not be more different from her sister, who, in any case, denies the relationship. At fourteen, Thisbe has chosen to devote her life to God, a stance not shared by any of her heathen family members. She spends her afternoons trying to save the souls of neighborhood pets. Thisbe is deeply afraid for her family and prays starkly violent old testement prayers that she might be martyred in exchange for their salvation, or at least their happiness.
Henry
Henry Casper, Jonathan's father, is a 76-year-old nursing home resident with several aborted escape attempts. A neurological disorder impedes Henry's ability to speak, a condition that Henry has built upon with a self-imposed daily word limit that decreases daily until he no longer will speak at all. His ultimate goal is to disappear completely, and to that end he is eating less and less each day and elaborately purging himself of his own memories, which are fraught with inherited guilt and familial shame.
Thisbe could not be more different from her sister, who, in any case, denies the relationship. At fourteen, Thisbe has chosen to devote her life to God, a stance not shared by any of her heathen family members. She spends her afternoons trying to save the souls of neighborhood pets. Thisbe is deeply afraid for her family and prays starkly violent old testement prayers that she might be martyred in exchange for their salvation, or at least their happiness.
Henry
Henry Casper, Jonathan's father, is a 76-year-old nursing home resident with several aborted escape attempts. A neurological disorder impedes Henry's ability to speak, a condition that Henry has built upon with a self-imposed daily word limit that decreases daily until he no longer will speak at all. His ultimate goal is to disappear completely, and to that end he is eating less and less each day and elaborately purging himself of his own memories, which are fraught with inherited guilt and familial shame.
While driving hard towards thematic notions about life's complexities, The Great Perhaps is a paean to its anti-war forbear, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Author Joe Meno arrives at roughly the same non-conclusion, that writing an anti-war book is about as effective as writing an anti-glacier book. The Great Perhaps is a novel whose playful peregrinations belie its serious intentions. Because in the midst of pursuing collasal cephalopods and oddly intelligent cloud figures, Joe Meno delivers the story of a family, and perhaps a nation, at a crucial moment in history, failed by collective cowardice and the promise of easy answers.
