Fiction: ‘Weepers' by Peter Mendelsund

Wall Street Journal

19 hours ago

'Call for the wailing women to come; send for the most skillful among them,' enjoined the prophet Jeremiah in his lament for the fallen Israelites. The verse points up the ancient custom of hiring professional mourners to preside at funerals, a practice that has been revived in Peter Mendelsund's fablelike 'Weepers.' Set in a speculative version of the American Southwest, this sweetly wistful novel is narrated by Ed Franklin, 'cowboy poet, powerful sad sack' and a dues-paying member of the Local 302 union of weepers, whose job is to cry on command during eulogies and burials.
Business is good for the weepers, an ambiguous blessing. As Ed explains, an emotional numbness has gripped the country and people rely on the weepers' services to activate their own sadness—to 'get things going, meaning set match to tinder'—or simply to handle the sorrowing for them. But if Ed has plenty of work, he is also obliged to stay perpetually in character. All the weepers have guises, and Ed is the sensitive cowpoke who likes his whiskey and writes high-lonesome poems about life on the range (even if, in reality, he often shares a bed with his fetching colleague Chantal, who plays the femme fatale).
Into his securely melancholic routine arrives a scruffy, taciturn young man known only as the kid, who begins working with the weepers but in an unusual fashion. The kid himself never cries, but he is preternaturally gifted at awakening the feelings of those around him. Even the merest laying on of his hands can turn a mourner into a sobbing mound of jelly. From the start Ed senses that this mysterious stranger 'was a marker; a sign of some new dispensation,' and the story follows the disturbances he begins to cause within the community.
Mr. Mendelsund makes the kid a Christ-like figure, with Ed as his would-be Peter the Apostle, and the text is scattered with sly scriptural Easter eggs for readers who know the Gospels. Some locals are threatened by the kid's ability to call up their most deeply repressed and destabilizing emotions. When the kid is beaten up he refuses to defend himself. Ed tries, mostly in vain, to help him, to bond with him and to read miracles into his every deed. Ed's faith springs from his own psychological alterations, the most volatile being the sensation of hope. For a weeper, even a shred of happiness is a career killer.