"Beneath all of her thoughts and worries, beneath the complication of conflicting identities and needs, maybe it's as simple as loving the way some other person looks when they're sleeping."

Would give it 4 and 1/2 if it existed; not quite a 5 because I'm not sure even Meno can live up to the brilliant high school angst and heartbreak that is one of my favorites: Hairstyles of the Damned!

Jonathan has a unique problem: he faints whenever he sees a cloud, or something in the shape of a cloud, or even a great big white SUV which makes him think of a cloud. Yet, he hates to take his anti-seizure medication because it makes him feel like he's in a cloud. One day he's on an outing to the zoo with his family, wife Madeline and two children, Amelia and Thisbe, and lapses into a seizure, throwing the family into a tailspin and possible destruction.

The tale is told mainly in five different points of view: the family above and Jonathan's father, Henry. Meno examines what courage is in this novel, evident in the brief chapters told from generations past in Jonathan's family.

Amelia and Thisbe's chapters were my favorites: Meno does a superb job of capturing what it is like to be in high school, trying to discover your identity, trying to not care what others think of you (but of course you do). ( )

a very good book and gives you hope that everything will be
Ok.

Chicago author Joe Meno is best known for his coming of age novel “Hairstyles of the Damned,” a pitch-perfect portrayal of the trials and tribulations of being a teenager in the 80s. This time around, he broadens his approach, casting a shrewd eye on the Casper family and their lives in Chicago in the early years of the second Iraq war and leading up to the Bush-Kerry election.

Father of the family Jonathan suffers from a strange variety of epilepsy…rather than lights and sounds, his seizures are triggered by the most unlikely of things: clouds. He is a paleontologist specializing in giant squid; he has sunk years of his life into the theory that some species of prehistoric giant squid may not be extinct at all. Now it seems that another team of scientists may be about to prove his theory before he can. He has thrown himself into his work at the expense of everything else in his life, including his children and his wife. Wife Madeline, also a scientist, is forced to pick up all the slack and she’s not happy about it. Her research is suffering for it…the pigeons upon which she is conducting a dominance study have begun to murder each other and she cannot fathom why. She has begun to hallucinate a figure made out of clouds hanging above the family’s home and wandering above the streets of the city and she cannot help but follow it, leaving her family alone for hours and even days at a time.

While their marriage hangs together by the barest thread, Madeline and Johnathan’s two children don’t have an easy time of it, either. Older daughter Amelia is a wanna-be anti-capitalist activist. She listens to French music, wears a black beret, and writes scathing and unintentionally hilarious diatribes for the school paper as her disgust for modern American society brings her ever closer to the possibility of committing an act of violence. Poor younger daughter Thisbe has hit upon the perfect way for a daughter of two scientists to rebel: she has found God and begun to pray both desperately and naively. Her greatest wish is to be able to sing beautifully—she is atrocious—and an adolescent crush on the best singer in the school chorus—who happens to be a girl—throws her deeper into turmoil. Meanwhile, aging grandfather Henry wishes only to disappear and has begun to speak less and less, writing his memories down so as to let go of them.

Meno is, as before, at his strongest when writing the voices of the disaffected youths, but his portrayals of their parents and, most poignantly, of the memories of aging Henry’s childhood in a Texas internment camp for Germans during World War II, are sympathetic and realistic. As the family’s many preoccupations knock into each other, glimmers of hope arise, including the hope that if a family as dysfunctional as this can make it through, so can the rest of us. ( )

http://michael-hartford.com/blog/?p=5... ( )

The members of the Casper family are pulling its existence apart at the seams. Running headlong in four vastly different directions, John, Madeline, Amelia and Thisbe each seem to embody one faction of American society in their own convoluted ways.
John, a paleontologist, is on a frenzied nautical life-mission to track down a prehistoric, giant squid. He faints at the sight of clouds of any form unless he has taken a pill. When we find him, both predicaments have worn thin on the three women in his life but neither one seem to be at any near point of conclusion.
Madeline, an animal behaviorist, is observing pigeons in captivity to track trends in power dynamics. She has committed the researcher sin of forging an attachment with several of the birds, making it emotionally devastating when they begin destroying each other in a murderous hierarchy. This tragedy compounds her disappointment with her failing marriage. Soon after the story starts, Madeline beings to see a man-shaped cloud, an entity she eventually leaves to pursue.
Their oldest daughter, Amelia, is a teenage anarchist intent on blowing up her school, which she finds to be the embodiment of corrupt politics, or the local, Starbucks or both. She continually lands herself in sticky situations with the school staff, such as publishing a school paper blast exposing their alleged labor atrocities involving the kitchen staff.
Their younger daughter, Thisbe has recently taken up the hobby of praying which she does from sun up to sun down at every turn in her day, much to the annoyance of her parents and sister who have deemed the practice of any religion antiquated. Her born-again, borderline xenophobic tendencies serve to confuse and exasperate her mother who believes that they are in direct relation to the problems in the parents’ relationship.
Henry, John’s father, is confined to a nursing home and is attempting to silence himself out of existence by limiting his words, dropping one word from the count every day. The institution warns his family that he has limited time left but the Caspers seem too disorganized to assemble any concrete sense of worry.
Meno has created a beautifully abstract yet hauntingly realistic look at the current state of the American family. His prose is simple and succinct but the overall dynamic of the book is complex enough that the larger effect is one of intricate, layered storytelling. The book is written moving forward in a tag team effort, alternating through the five family members in order. In this manner, we never see the same exact scene from two different views but we do have a sense of similar themes along the same timeline in different voices.
I will say this as a warning: I loved this book but I enjoy post-modern, experimental literature. I adore Pynchon and Vonnegut. Meno follows closely behind those two gentlemen. It is much more accessible than Pynchon while remaining more complex than a Vonnegut. If abstract wanderings and surrealist flashbacks are not your cup of tea than this will most likely hit a low note for you. If you are looking for a quick and readable, albeit dark and twisted mini-romp through the postmodern family, however, this is definitely a book for you. ( )