This review first appeared on Murmur.com.

My first exposure to author Joe Meno was with his novel The Boy Detective Fails. It was one of those bookstore shelf discoveries: a cover catches your eye, the text on the back intrigues you, the fact that the book contains a “decoder wheel” excites you… you know, the typical stuff.

The Boy Detective Fails weaves a tale that mixes whimsy with the complexities of modern life in equal doses. Imagine Encyclopedia Brown all grown up and taking Prozac.

His next book, Demons in the Spring, is a collection of short stories, and as with most collections of its kind, it’s a mixed bag. Still, the Meno earmarks are there, that blend of magical realism that captures the loneliness, the heartache and the mundane details of life while still feeling whimsical — a world where a man can have a wife who is a cloud, a world in which a woman’s illness is actually a miniature airport growing inside of her.

Now Meno has returned to the novel form to bring us The Great Perhaps. Significantly more grounded than his previous two works, this new novel deals with the middle-age crisis of an entire family. And yet, there’s still that touch of magic in the various threads that compose the Casper family’s tale. In fact, Meno’s work here reminds me greatly of the worlds created in Wes Anderson’s films. This is our reality… mostly… but it’s somehow larger and more absurd.

Jonathan Casper is a paleontologist searching for a mythical giant squid. He falls into strange epileptic seizures whenever he sees a cloud. His wife is a research scientist concerned about the murders being committed by the pigeons in her study. Their daughters are a Amelia, a beret-wearing, bomb-building, anti-capitalist would-be revolutionary, and Thisbe, who is trying to baptize the neighborhood cat. Also in the mix is Jonathan?s father, Henry, an old aeronautics engineer who is using fewer and fewer words until he disappears.

Set in Chicago prior to the 2004 election, Meno’s narrative follows this family as it begins to break down. Chapters focus on different characters, slightly overlapping in chronology, creating the slightly stuttering film of a dysfunctional family searching for answers and meaning in life. Meno also weaves interludes into the narrative, which cover various historical ancestors of the Casper family. These often inform the main narrative, although they serve more as a flourish than an integral part of the book’s main  plot.

The novel moves briskly, the author’s simple, witty prose accurately capturing the humor, the magic, and the complexity of life. In places the novel feels as quirky and fantastic as Wes Anderson’s Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. And following that cinematic comparison, other parts of the novel seems to dive more deeply into the ambiguous territory of Noah Baumbach’s films, like The Squid and the Whale or Margot at the Wedding. Using film analogies here is perhaps an apt comparison, as the novel takes on a cinematic pace, bringing plot threads together to find their resolutions. In some cases, the resolutions are a little too pat, too neat, although never in a cloying Hollywood manner.

In the end, Meno makes his intentions clear, almost a little too clear in some regards, as the symbolic imagery he’s littered through the story take on a greater clarity and meaning, and each member of the Casper family discovers in his or her own truth about  life and his or her place in it.