It's okay, pretty lite across the board. ( )

Heartfelt and offbeat-
a very insightful look into family dynamics-
sort of reads like David Foster Wallace lite-
great use of a variety of writing styles without being gimmicky- ( )

This novel focuses on the Casper family. The father/husband/son, Jonathan, is a scientist obsessed with finding the elusive giant squid. So obsessed that he barely realizes the rest of his family exists. The mother/wife, Madeline, is also a scientist but she researches bird behavior. She is growing increasingly frustrated with her husband and her work. Amelia and Thisbe, their daughters, have their own inner turmoil. While Amelia experiences teenage angst at the injustices of the world, Thisbe is fixated with prayer and salvation in a non-religious family. Finally, Jonathan’s father, Henry, is slowly dying in an adult facility.

As each of these characters go about their mundane lives, they secretly hold disappointments of themselves and each other. As they move along they find it more difficult to go on with the status quo. They each have different ways to break out of it all. In the end, they realize that what they really need is truth and declaration in order to realize the changes they want.

Nothing much really happens in this book. None of the characters are particularly likeable. There is no protagonist or antagonist, per se. The side stories are meandering and a little boring. Nothing really feels connected as the characters also feel. None of the emotions and characters seem genuine.

This is a brilliant and entertaining novel. Meno offers an insightful and humorous portrait of one highly dysfunctional family, while also exploring some fascinating big ideas. The story is told from the multiple perspectives of five members of the same family, the Caspers: father, Jonathan, a kind of nutty professor who is completely absorbed by his study of an ancient, but still alive, squid; his wife, Madeline, an academic as well, who is studying aggression in pigeons and is deeply resentful of her husband’s neglect at home; oldest daughter Amelia, a high school junior and wannabe Marxist, who writes long creeds against capitalism in her school paper; Thisbe, a high school freshman, who is constantly begging God to offer some evidence of his existence, while also hating herself for her attraction to another girl in her class; and grandfather, Henry, who has perhaps the most moving tale of all. He was the son of a German tailor, who was arrested for sedition and sent to an internment camp during World War II. Henry always longed to build and fly airplanes, and he becomes an aeronautical engineer, but then discovers a plane he built is used to drop napalm during the Vietnam War. He experiences a nervous breakdown, after he realizes he has unwittingly repeated the sins of his own father, whose greed brought about the death of Japanese families who were interned at the WWII camp next to the Germans. Henry’s neglect as a father helped contribute to the utter befuddlement with which his son, Jonathan, lives his life. Jonathan suffers from a unique condition – he experiences seizures when he sees clouds. But the many doctors who try to understand his condition come to the conclusion that Jonathan is having a fight or flight response in the presence of clouds, and that his flight response may stem from an inherited condition of cowardice. So interwoven with the stories of the five living Casper family members, we get brilliantly told tales of Jonathan’s forbears demonstrating their cowardice over the course of many centuries past – all when faced with monumental challenges such as an Indian uprising against their British colonial occupiers, a sailors’ revolt when a trade ship gets stuck in the ice, and a charge of sedition for one of the predecessors who conspired with the French during the reign of King Wilhelm of Prussia. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s and Madeline’s academic research ties into all of these themes. Jonathan is studying a prehistoric squid, which may yield great insights into evolution, but which is also difficult to find because it prefers isolation in the depths of the ocean. When one is actually discovered alive by a rival French academic, its exposure to other beings eager to study and examine it, causes it to die. When Jonathan’s marriage begins to fall apart, he takes the same isolationist route, hiding in his den, with a sheet shielding the bed he sleeps alone in. Madeline makes an unexpected discovery with the pigeons she studies. When she removes the alpha males from the cages, the beta males begin displaying aberrant behavior – raping and killing one female after another. Much as modern humans may hate it (and Marxist daughter Amelia is one prime example), all living beings, including humans, may need a hierarchical structure to keep their societies and lives in tact. So the question is will Jonathan be able to rescue his family by finally being man enough to lead it. All though the novel are wonderful little gems – young Henry loves live listening to young radio plays. Meno offers whole transcripts of science fiction adventures, which Henry listen to with an unexpected friend – a young soldier guarding him and his family at the internment camp. Amelia wants to hate everyone, but she becomes the unwitting victim of a sleazy college professor and wants to hate the most popular boy in school – the president of the student council who’s called into take her job as editor of the school paper when her columns prove too inflammatory. This popular boy could be a cad right out of central casting, but Meno makes him an affectionate and sympathetic character constantly reaching out and finding some good in Amelia even when’s she tearing into him with her caustic, cynical wit. And there’s a wonderful continuing line about the clouds that intimidate Jonathan. Cloud shapes spoke to his cowardly predecessors, and when Madeline goes a little crazy about her husband’s neglect, she begins to think one cloud shape is speaking to her, so she begins chasing clouds, and in her delusion the one cloud she’s chasing may have something important to say to her. As I try to outline all the threads at work in this story, I can understand why it might seem impossible that any author could weave all these multiple storylines and ideas into one compelling, readable novel. But Meno pulls the feat off and amazingly so. It’s a grand achievement to have crafted something so simultaneously entertaining, thought-provoking and insightful. ( )

In The Great Perhaps, Joe Meno is able to capture a typical dysfunctional American family at the brink of a mental break down. With this family, Joe Meno demonstrates that life is complicated. However, he also enlightens the reader to the paradox that there is simplicity to even the most complicated of matters. While containing such weighty themes, The Great Perhaps also manages to be quirky, funny, and touching. ( )