The two epigrams for The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno establish the book’s two great themes. First, Kurt Vonnegut: “One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war.”
Set against the backdrop of the Bush/Kerry election season Meno explores the idea of war and conflict by looking at the Casper family. The father, Jonathan, is obsessed with finding a prehistoric squid. The mother, Madeline, can’t understand why her research pigeons are brutalizing each other. The oldest daughter, Amelia, wants to a make a statement against capitalism with her history project. The youngest, Thisbe, wants God to heal her family. And their grandfather, Henry, is slowly discarding memories one at a time and longs to escape the nursing home.
In an interview with Edan Lepucki at The Millions, Meno said, “What becomes apparent is how lonely they are in each other’s company, because they’re all failing to see how none of those perspectives are mutually exclusive, and how we need all of those ways of understanding to make sense of the complexities of the world.”
Each character is sympathetically rendered, though it’s clear that Meno has no love for the Bushies or for Thisbe’s faith (which is why it’s really the crudest cliché in the book—her prayers are painful and seem more a way to ridicule her than to consider her heart).
Meno said, “I realized the book was about complexity, and the need for it, and how terrified we, as Americans, seemed to have become of anything complicated or uncertain.”
It’s especially through Madeline and Amelia that the frustration with the Iraq war and its presentation to the public that Meno’s voice comes through.
Madeline thinks,
“When did we get so used to always having to fight somebody? When did we get so used to the idea of war? How come no one’s really talking about how terrible this idea really is? How come no one’s asking any questions? And how come there are no protests? How come there’s no rationing? No rubber drives? How did war become such a distant, everyday thing?…How come my own girls aren’t more upset by what’s happening? Why doesn’t it seem more important to anybody? And how come no one’s affected by anything like they used to be?”
This shows why Meno’s so clever—it’s about the war, but it’s also really not about the war. The war only revealed the bigger questions about our humanity and where we are as a culture today. Amelia’s frustration with her peers and what happens when she writes a controversial newspaper article help underscore the problem of apathy and the status quo.
Contrast this sort of distance with Henry, Jonathan’s father who helped design the F-4 Phantom, watching a bombing on TV: “…all Henry can do is sit there on his sofa, thousands and thousands of miles away and begin to weep, quietly, regretfully, without surprise. His empty hands reach out toward the absolute distance of the television screen.”
Eventually all of the characters (who are followed in third person limited point of view in rotating chapters) and their conflicts and flaws intersect and are united through cloud imagery.
Meno on the cloud as his symbol of the necessity of war:
“I used a similar image – a cloud – which is also part of the natural world, and is also pretty impossible to avoid. The other thing about the cloud is that it’s amorphous, ever-changing, unclear, which speaks directly to the way all of the characters see the world in which they’re living. To me, that’s what’s necessary or beautiful about the image: they’re the physical manifestation of the idea of uncertainty or complexity.”
And as Meno did in books like The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned, he effectively captures the lostness of life and the baby steps we take toward redemption when we get far enough gone.
That takes us to the second epigram, from Thornton Wilder: “Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.”
Each character is driven by an unknowable, and Meno is great at allowing the unexplainable to have space in his worlds. Whether it’s the cloud that Madeline can’t shake, Thisbe’s flying episodes, or the other-worldly squid that Jonathan chases, we see in their unattainable longings some of our own hopes. So much so that by the novel’s climax with Henry, we will them to fly. Perhaps…
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