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A quirky keeper
THE GREAT PERHAPS
By Joe Meno
414 pp. W.W. Norton Company, Inc. $24.95
Reviewed by Sue Ellis
At first I was appalled by this quirky story about the Caspers—a family of misfits—and their sicko lives. I wasn’t sure if the characters were supposed to be satirical or comic; mostly they made me sad. As their story unfolds, however, they become identifiably human, lovable, complicated, and funny.
Jonathan is an unsuccessful research scientist who studies giant squid and needs seizure medication if he sees a cloud, or even something resembling a cloud. His wife Madeline tries to keep their floundering marriage together, but finds herself stymied by a husband who is preoccupied with squid, daughters who are weird, and her own failings as a mother, wife, and pigeon research scientist. Amelia, the oldest daughter is a smart teenage revolutionary—confused, hateful, and uncomfortably close to being dangerous. In the midst of the chaos, fourteen-year-old Thisbe, the Casper’s attention-starved youngest, clumsily prays for a better singing voice, despite never having been to church:
Dear God, who Art in Heaven, Who is the Great Redeemer and Seer of All Good Things. Oh, Lord in Heaven, Heavenly Father, oh, Heavenly Lord, please grant me this one prayer, this one wish. Give me the voice I deserve. Let my lungs sound like a trumpet, let the words ring from my voice like the bell tolling for judgment. Let all the girls and boys sitting here backstage be stricken with awe and confusion and envy. Let Mr. Grisham in his all-time meanness be smited like St. Paul before he was St. Paul. Let Mr. Grisham be knocked down from his white horse of self-righteousness.... I ask this through Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
Grandpa Henry Casper broke my heart. A descendant of German tailors, Henry is in a nursing home spending his last days planning an escape by air to Japan. His history unfolds via flashbacks and with short notes beginning with the words, “To whom it may concern.” He stamps, seals, and mails the notes to himself, hoping his son, Jonathan, will decipher their meaning after he’s gone.
Ancestors, long dead, are introduced in sub-chapters with short titles like: “Additional Remarks of a Historical Significance,” and describing such episodes as a hapless Casper ancestor losing his life at the hands of a German firing squad in 1869.
Bernard Casper, now shivering, has begun to weep. ...Seven shots ring out, all at once, each round delivering certain death. But one, a single bullet, tears through the gray wool of Bernard’s pants, cutting hard across the bones of his hip, puncturing what has always been most important to all men, his scrotum, then continuing on, the bullet screaming through the open doors of a barn, cracking the front windowpane of the Edel family, the town’s only tailors, passing through a gray cloth curtain to where a young girl named Elsie Edel, is, at that moment, precariously balancing on the edge of a zinc bathtub. The single shot pierces the soft fruit of her navel and impolitely imparts her womb with the impossible mystery of life.
With enviable skill, the author has woven a story suggesting that a combination of genetics, chance, and free will have formed the Casper family tree and resulted in this modern-day family—flawed and stressed, but still punching.
Meno is probably right; we are all at the mercy of our cumulative experience as human beings on this earth, all trying to slide the last few Rubik’s tiles into place and solve the puzzle of why and who we are. In the end, the Caspers aren’t so different from many families who try to find fulfillment and happiness together in a world gone a little nuts.
The end of the story dazzles; Meno skillfully brings all the characters together for an uplifting climax that in no way minimizes their struggle. My only complaint is that a graphic and degrading sex scene between Amelia and a college professor makes the book inappropriate for young adult readers. Too bad, because they’d enjoy the message this book imparts: family, warts and all, is what matters most. The Great Perhaps is unique and, yeah, quirky. It’s a keeper.
Sue Ellis is a retired postmaster who lives and writes in Spokane, Washington. Her short stories have appeared at Flash Me Magazine, Wild Violet, Six Sentences, and Camroc Press Review, all online publications.
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