Publisher: Picador

ISBN: 9780330519533

RRP: $32.99

Jonathan Casper – father of teenage daughters Thisbe and Amelia; son of Henry, an ex-aeronautical engineer for the US Air force; and husband to Madeline, whose research into the behaviour of pigeons is yielding bizarre results – suffers from a rare form of epilepsy. Upon seeing the complex shapes of clouds, he collapses in a terrifying seizure. A New England Journal of Medicine article offers some insight into the condition:

Ongoing research suggests that the cloud itself represents an autonomic fear of complexity, and that this unusual neurological response to a terror-stimulus is simply the survival instinct of a species that inhabits a world which has, over such a short period of time, become much too complicated.

With this, two of the main co-ordinates of Joe Meno’s latest novel are mapped – cowardice in the face of complexity. Through the gradual collapse of the Casper family, The Great Perhaps explores each member’s fears, and their attempts to avoid as well as ameliorate them in an increasingly inscrutable world.

Everyone in this family is running from something. We have Jonathan, a dorky palaeontologist in search of a possibly extinct giant squid. Like a child avoiding the calamities of a dysfunctional family, Jonathan creates a fort in the basement, poring over his books to avoid the reality of his failing marriage and career. Madeline, his wife, also fleeing professional and marital disappointments, takes to following a human-shaped cloud across the city for nights on end. Navigating both the breakdown of their family and their fraught adolescence, beret-wearing Amelia throws herself headlong into a naïve and militant socialism, while Thisbe finds God. Henry, their grandfather, confronted with the choices he has made, chases redemption in oblivion, jettisoning his memories by writing them down and posting them to himself, while each day culling a word from his vocabulary. He has eleven left when we meet him. Read more

Emmett Stinson is an American who moved to Australia in 2004 – and it was only with distance from his homeland that he could write Known Unknowns, his debut collection.

Podcast roadmap: Washington DC; corpses; Capgras syndrome; the best place to buy drugs in America; The Education of Henry Adams; spoiling the end of The Great Gatsby; failure in the American tradition; Phantoms in the Brain; the terrible ending of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; the disintegration of systems; rampant individualism; how the writing brain is informed by the editorial brain; the Federal Government’s Book Industry Strategy Group.

Visit Emmett Stinson’s blog.

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Music is Pompey.