WEEPERS

In a near future that’s both emotionally and physically desiccated, a ragtag union of professional mourners provides the needed moisture.

Ed is a cowboy poet in the desert Southwest. He’s stable and reliable (even in the ways he finesses his alcoholism), settled, a stand-up guy who emerged bloodied but upright from domestic tragedy in his youth. And he’s found a calling in late middle age as a linchpin of Local 302, the Weepers, who go from town to town, funeral to funeral, and provide tears to prime the pump of grief in a world rapidly drying up into ugliness, flatness, disconnection. It’s not clear at first what the group should make of the newly arrived “kid,” a scrawny, taciturn presence who joins them for memorial services, intermittently, and who—though he doesn’t ever cry himself—contains a silent reservoir of sorrow that moves Local 302 to new heights (or depths) of conspicuous grief. Is the kid a petty criminal, a masochist, the victim of some terrible misdeed? Drifter, messiah, lost soul, blank screen upon which to project one’s own anxieties? All of the above, perhaps. Ed soon becomes the mysterious young man’s booster, apologist, protector, fan, friend, bail-payer, even matchmaker. Ed’s voice throughout the novel is darkly funny, wry, perceptive—charming. The kid, like many a cipher, never comes fully alive on the page, so the plot never quite kindles, but Mendelsund amply compensates for that with the playful wit and music of the prose.

Stylish, witty, surreal—a meditation on the power of emotion to bind us in an ever-drier, less hospitable world.