Weepers
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A messianic tale about a group of professional mourners—a darkly funny novel of grief, mystery and redemption from the author of The Delivery.
Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper.
He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services and burials. It’s an odd job, but his services are sorely needed these days, as the town, the region, the country as a whole has become more or less numb. No one is able to summon a shred of human emotion whatsoever. Not anymore. (What’d be the point? The world’s already gone to hell.)
So there’s always work for Ed and his colleagues. But all those cries can wear a man down, and the tears don’t flow quite like they used to, even for a consummate pro like Ed.
Then one morning, a stranger comes to town. A scrawny kid with no belongings, no parents, no name, no past. And at precisely the moment of his arrival, people begin to experience something new. Something strange. An onslaught of unbidden feelings, unfamiliar feelings, too many feelings
A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund’s Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A group of professional mourners are transfixed by a charismatic young colleague in this captivating burlesque from Mendelsund (The Delivery). Narrated by Ed, a self-styled "cowboy poet," the story follows his fellow members of Local 302, a union of "weepers" hired to cry for the dead in their declining Southwestern town and its neighboring communities. The ragtag group's constituents play to type; among them are Chantal, the "femme fatale" with smeared mascara; Dill, the "best pal"; Johnny, the "soldier"; and exotic "outsiders" the Nguyens. But these weepers are in a rut, their tears mechanical and their sadness performative until a new member, the Kid, infuses their work with an almost mystical force. The Kid speaks little and does not cry himself, but every service he attends erupts into sobs. Ed grows obsessed with solving the twin riddles of the Kid's powerful presence and his mysterious notebook, which is filled with the names of every deceased person he's mourned, including some whose names were entered suspiciously before their deaths. Mendelsund suffuses his meditation on performative grief with inspired stylistic flourishes, evoking the cadences of Donald Antrim and the baroque drama of Flannery O'Connor. As the story builds toward a violent showdown between the mourners and the town, the reader will be entranced by its surreal language and bizarre logic. This is astonishing.
