Review by Booklist Review
After the otherworldly setting of The Delivery (2021), Mendelsund's latest is set in a relatively recognizable world, but one where the narrator, Ed, is part of an unusual group hired to cry at funerals. Ed is haunted by the ghost of his father, drinks a lot, and writes some questionable poetry about his cowboy dreams. In this rural corner of America, Ed and his friends provide a surprisingly necessary service as others struggle to express emotion. On the periphery of this narrative is the (sadly) everyday violence of American life (school shootings make one brief shocking appearance). Ed's life is turned upside down when a nameless, largely voiceless young man, who has a seemingly miraculous and indescribable gift to make people feel things, appears and joins the group. His almost messianic aura entrances Ed and repulses others, and "the kid's" interactions with a brilliant cast of characters drive the story. In this fascinating and hilarious consideration of the repression of grief and feeling in contemporary America, Mendelsund explores faith, mourning, friendship, and death in his singularly evocative style.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
