Joe Meno: Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

Renowned in America for being a short story writer and novelist, Joe Meno has recently had his first UK-published novel released, The Great Perhaps- a sardonic look at a dysfunctional family quietly falling apart in the run-up to the 2004 US presidential election. The Great Perhaps manages to perfectly encapsulate a time without being too politically heavy-handed or morose. It manages to use the family dynamic as a metaphor for American society at large, all with humour, warmth and the discovery of a mythical squid.

We caught up with him to talk about the re-writing of American history.

> How are you?

I’m very excited about the reception The Great Perhaps has gotten in the UK. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it.

> Set up the book for us- what’s it about?

The Great Perhaps follows the lives of the five members of the Casper family who live in Chicago. Father, Jonathan, is a paleontologist who has spent his career searching for an elusive prehistoric giant squid. His wife, Madeline, is an animal researcher conducting an experiment concerning dominance in social birds. Amelia, their eldest daughter, has recently declared herself a Marxist at the age of seventeen. Their youngest daughter, Thisbe, has decided to devote herself to finding God. Grandfather Henry, who resides in a retirement home, is trying to escape. Each in their own way, the family members are facing uncertainty in their life and are trying to negotiate the pervasive sense of fear that’s become a regular feature of modern, industrialised life.

> The Great Perhaps evokes the impending doom/inevitability of the 2004 election well. What are your memories of that time?

I was working for an arts and culture magazine at the time, Punk Planet, and we spent a lot of time working to prevent President Bush from being re-elected. My wife and I volunteered to go to another state to help register voters. As for the election itself, we all stayed up until about 1 am when they finally announced the results. I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed, and as embarrassed, as an American before. It was the first real time in my adult life that the political had become very personal.

> What caused you to write this book?

I started writing the book a few weeks after the election. It was my way to try to come to an understanding of what was going on in our country at the time. The question I had was: why has America become so crippled by fear, and has something like this ever happened before, is this really just part of what it means to be a human?

> The dysfunctional family archetype is a familiar set-up in American literature. How did you go about adding something new to this?

What I wanted to explore was the scientific nature of dysfunction, and how personality traits like cowardice, may actually be hereditary, and how as a species, fear has shaped us, both on a large scale, and in our everyday relationships. I think I most often drew on my life and my family, to try and build the characters. Jonathan, the father, is someone searching for something most people don’t have any interest in. Being a fiction writer feels sort of comparable.

> Who is your favourite dysfunctional family in literature and why?

The Antrobus family from Thornton Wilder’s play Skin of Our Teeth, without a doubt. The play follows one family over the course of a few million years, from the ice age to the Great Depression to the aftermath of an apocalyptic war, and shows the resilience of family, how all these questions we have about our world, all go back to the microscopic worlds of our families.

> There’s a lot of mention of music throughout. Was this your soundtrack to writing the book?

The album I went back to most often was the Beatles’ White Album. There’s something about the expansiveness, about their willingness to try and capture all of twentieth century music in those two records, and the great variety of moods and tones, from absurdity to love songs to social commentary, that I wanted to try and emulate. The song 'Yellow Submarine,' though not technically on the White Album, opens the book.

> How did you write the book, piecing together 4 separate narrative arcs?

It took me close to four years to write the book. It’s the most heavily-researched novel I’ve written and so a lot of that time was devoted to research. I usually work for about three hours a day, in the morning. I had very little planning which is maybe why it took four years. I knew I wanted to write scenes where the family was together, but unhappy, which would take place at the beginning of the book, and then scenes with two family members together, as the family begins to implode, and then scenes with single characters at the height of the book, and then scenes where the family members begin to find each other again.

> What the best book you’ve ‘read in ages’?

In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan. It’s set in some apocalyptic future where people make clothes, furniture, and houses all from the sugar cultivated in watermelons. There’s also a group of marauding, talking tigers as well.

> Who is your favourite author and why?

I guess the answer to that question depends on my mood: I go back to William Faulkner a lot, whenever I want to be humbled. Certainly J D Salinger has had a huge influence on me, as well as Sherwood Anderson, who’s maybe a little lesser known but was just as important. It was the first writer I discovered who was from the Midwest and really embraced that.

Joe Meno website