Joe Meno / Features / Untitled Books

"Bush was very good at giving these simple short answers, while John Kerry gave these long, complicated, rambling answers. When people are afraid they want simplicity."

Joe Meno

Marrying shrewd observation of contemporary anxieties with a darkly funny observation of family life, Joe Meno's fifth novel has drawn comparisons with The Corrections. Written in response to the Bush election in 2004, this is the first time he has felt politically engaged, he tells James Vitus.

Joe Meno the writer and Joe Meno the man are like first cousins; clearly related and in many ways most similar, but not quite the same thing. My expectations may have played a part in this, of course. He is a new name here, but has already met comparisons with Jonathan Franzen. The Chicago native is only 36 but has a long bibliography behind him. On the page he is masterfully assured; in person he is sweetly modest, with the air of a young history teacher. He interviews like a seasoned pro, but is generous and politely deferent in conversation, and completely free of arrogance. He used to drive a flower delivery van, which somehow says everything about his character, but nothing at all about his writing.

This is the first time he has been published in the UK, and the second time he's toured his book The Great Perhaps. He's also working on the screenplay with The Blind Side producer Gil Netter, so having put down his pen two years ago, he's now up to his nose in it again. Far from being weary of having to revisit old ground, he seems genuinely pleased. "It's actually this great experience. It's a chance to go back and remind yourself of what you liked about the book or why you wrote the book." The idea of a film is tantalising; the story has affinities with the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, and would translate perfectly onto screen.

The Great Perhaps follows the Caspar Family as it struggles to find its axis. Jonathan is a palaeontologist in search of an elusive giant prehistoric squid. His wife Madeline is an animal behaviourist studying a pigeon micro-society that seems to be descending into violence. Their eldest daughter Amelia is a self-styled communist and scourge of the school newspaper, while their younger, Thisbe, has recently found God. Jonathan is a weak man and a hopeless patriarch. His influence as a father and husband is defined by his absence, and without a lynchpin his family is free to unravel. Each of the Caspers inhabits their own separate sphere, ghosts to one another in the struggle to understand themselves. And there is plenty to understand; they are beset by quirks and idiocracies, which is reflected in the text itself: whole chapters are given over to alphabetical lists, episodes of a 1940s radio series are interspersed; letters and telegrams are transcribed; and diagrams of animals and clouds abut the text.

Thisbe and Amelia are the stars of the book. As Jonathan and Madeline's relationship breaks down, each of them retreats in to the solace and simplicity of radicalism. Their rebellions are both extreme, and extremely normal; noise and distraction from the tortures of teen-age. Thisbe's ardent faith sees her rounding up the neighbourhood cats in order to convert them to the saving grace of Jesus, and muttering in ostentatious prayer on family car trips. 'Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumour. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the back seat and my older sister be totally covered in blood.' Meanwhile, Amelia stalks the school corridors in a black beret, a solitary soldier in the war against capitalism. Meno has a brilliant ear for the argot of teenage girls. I assume this is thanks to time spent teaching - he teaches fiction at Colombia College in Chicago - but in fact, he laughs, "being a fiction writer, is pretty close to being like a teenage girl. You're alone in your room and you have these great one sided conversations with yourself." Whatever the case, he captures perfectly the strange sing-song cadences, the twisted logic and the manifold anxieties of the girls' adolescence.

Set in the run up to the 2004 US presidential election, The Great Perhaps is a surprisingly angry book. Meno's considered response to the Bush election and the war on terror goes some way to temper the whimsy of the Caspers, whose turmoil is both a reflection of and a response to the increasing unreliability of those in power and the politics of fear that was used to finagle policy in the wake of September 11^th. At the time Meno was working for an American magazine with a political bent, and was engaged throughout the campaign working against the incumbent administration. Bush's re-election had a profound effect on him. "In my adult life I had never been involved in political action, or as horribly disappointed by the results. It never had mattered that much to me. But now I felt deeply distraught," he remembers. "It was the first time I felt really embarrassed being American."

"A book comes out of some question you have about life, or about the world," he suggests, and the 2004 election and its aftermath provoked a whole knot of questions about how we are motivated - or repressed - by fear, and the exploitation of our personal anxieties for political ends. Was it something that occurred after the attack on the twin towers, or something people have been facing for centuries? "I started experimenting with that idea. What the Caspers are really afraid of is not just uncertainty, but complexity. They all want some simple answer in their life." Each is struggling with complicated questions and trying to arrive at simple answers. By the end of the book, they have all, to some degree, learned to live with their uncertainty and come to understand that complication is a condition of life, not a puzzle to be solved. "The book became an argument on behalf of the idea of complexity, why we need complex answers. That came out of my understanding of the war in Iraq, and with why I thought President Bush was re-elected. He's very good at giving these simple short answers, while his opponent, John Kerry gave these long, complicated, rambling answers, and I think when people are afraid they most want that simplicity, they want some simple answer to give them comfort."

There is at times a disparity between the cutenesses and contrivances of the characters, and Meno's intelligent, logical reasoning for them. On the page, the story can buckle under its own whimsy. There is the danger that each of the Caspers becomes reduced down to a set of symptoms and their very singular manifestations, such as Jonathan's debilitating phobia of clouds which causes him to fit and faint at the sight of them, and Madeline beguilement by the figure of a man-shaped cloud which she starts to follow in her Volvo on cross-county journeys to wherever it leads. Meno's argument for whimsy reaches back to the traditions of commedia dell arte via Beckett, Pirandello and the Surrealist movement, and lends credence and seriousness of purpose to his experiments on the page. But of course, a discussion with the author does not come with the purchase of every book, and one is left with a slight craving for a little less sugar and a little more salt.

The Great Perhaps is Meno's fifth novel and his seventh book. His experience is evident in the remarkable assuredness of the writing and his deft ventriloquism. There is a confidence and strength of voice that most writers arrive at only much later. The Great Perhaps certainly marks a departure from his previous books, as much as a progression. It's darker, more complex and in the main more than meets its own ambition. "I can't even go back and look at my first couple of books. There's that feeling that the first things you write are like these bad photographs of you from high school where you're dressed up like Robert Smith or something. You're like, 'What was I thinking?' he laughs, wincing. It's a good thing, surely? He agrees: "To me that's part of the process and that's what's really interesting about writing: in order to do anything interesting you have to do some really bad things. To write one good story you're going to write ten really bad stories, it's how you grow."

In this respect, he's lucky. His publishing career has allowed him to develop as a writer and find his voice over the course of a few books. There is a burden of expectation on writers, particularly in this country, and particularly as margins are squeezed ever tighter, to produce a perfect first novel and earn the right to a second according to how many books they sell. Publishers no longer have the luxury of investing in a writer's long-term career. "What a lot of publishers are looking for now is a hit," he agrees. "It's a mistake; they can pick the perfect cover, and they can have the best editor and a great marketing plan and tour, and a lot of the times good books don't get noticed right away." Meno's career to date is a perfect argument for a more farsighted approach to publishing and the patronage of writers, economically anachronistic though it may be. I can't help but feel that, in this case, it's going to pay dividends.