Does it seem like you can’t turn around lately without seeing Joe Meno’s name? It seems a bit that way to me, with Poets and Writers giving him a spread (which they’ve since seemingly taken down), and then the great Jonathan Dee giving Mr. Meno some love in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review. It’s good, this attention that Joe Meno’s getting: it’s a sign off things working well.
Because Mr. Meno’s got a new novel, called The Great Perhaps, and if there’s justice this’ll be the book that pushes Meno into Tom Perrotta-type territory: this is a complicated, weird, challenging book that’s balances real serious emphasis on character, theme, and idea, and if that particular triumverate sounds easy to pull of a balancing act of, I’d encourage you to publish more.
The book, in the most stripped-down way, is about a Chicago family of cowards, though that’s saying essentially nothing about the book (though, in fact, that’s statement’s one of the first on the book’s back, which I just now noticed, so maybe it’s more encompassing than I thought). What the book’s really about, of course, is not cowardice, nor is it about courage, even. (For the record: it’s a family of four—mom, dad, two daughters—plus a grandfather who is in an assisted living facility, and who [the grandfather] might be the most fascinating character in the whole book, the most rich and rewarding character.)
Which, yes, is why this book is such a rad, rad thing: it’d be thirty-two flavors of simple for Meno to make a nice little book with a nice little swinging door marked Meaning through which we readers file at the end, our baskets filled, our understanding clicked like a Rubik’s cube into place. Joe Meno, however, makes his book a complicated and unsettled, unsettling thing, a story that is fundamentally resistive in the best ways. Because, obviously, the books resistance isn’t a source of diminished pleasure, but increased: it resists being made anything other than what it is, and so the reader gets the wonderful, wonderful sensation of coming mentally into contact with a thing that is, in all sorts of ways, post-post-post-post: the thing is itself. The Great Perhaps is exclusively a novel of almost, of (it’s right there in the title) perhaps.
