Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 17, 2025
Edward D. Franklin describes himself as a “cowboy poet, powerful sad sack, five-tool infielder in the winningest, wettest crying-squad in the entire lower forty-eight.” Ed isn’t much of a poet (his repertoire consists of “cattle drives and campfires”) and he’s not a real cowboy (although his disastrous father owned a ranch so he can pass as one while acknowledging that he is not a “true member of that bowlegged brotherhood”). Lamenting the fact that cowboy is no longer a “viable career choice,” Ed remarks that “we love that life in a way that can only spring from acquaintance with a fallen Eden.”
The “crying-squad” consists of professional weepers, members of Local 302. Ed is the first-person narrator of Weepers. In Peter Mendelsund’s imagined America, emotional fatigue has swept the land. People who attend funerals need motivation to express their sorrow. Professional weepers get things started, or perhaps do the crying for those who can’t muster their own tears. They have stamina and know how to “get right down to it.” They also fill the pews to create the illusion that “the deceased was dearly loved and sorely missed.”
The weepers each have a part to play. Ed’s part is the cowboy poet, although why a cowboy poet would be expected to contribute to a funeral is puzzling. Joining Ed as union regulars are his buddy Dill Denvers, “the old, friendly neighbor of the bunch”; Johnnie, the group’s soldier; Lemon Barbara, the “old matron who’d drink you under the table and steal your wallet”; and a few others. Chief Clarance, taking his persona from an old commercial, “weeps for the land and what was taken.” The Nguyens play the role of outsiders. Weepers come and go, but the core of Local 302 has stayed the course. The union president, Regis, matches the members to funerals that will be served by their individual talents.
The premise — a nation in need of performative grief — is interesting but a weak foundation upon which to build a novel. To keep the story moving, Mendelsund adds a character known only as the Kid. The weepers are getting old (they seem to know many of the departed they mourn) but the Kid revitalizes the group. The Kid rarely cries but has a unique gift for making others sob. Ed reveres the Kid’s gift but fears that the other weepers resent his abilities, or perhaps his youth.
The Kid is often in trouble. Drugs and fights send him to jail. He loses control of his life. He steals from Ed after Ed tries to help him. Ed finds a notebook in which the Kid has recorded the names of everyone for whom he wept. Ed is distressed to discover that some of the names were entered before they died. While I can’t fault Mendelsund for avoiding a predictable path after he has Ed make that discovery, I was disappointed that more was not made of the story's most interesting plot twist.
Other characters add to the story’s background, if not its shaky plot. Ed’s ex-wife Jeannine quit her gig as a weeper. Ed and Jeannine were drawn to each other’s “ineradicable melancholy,” but Jeannine became anesthetized while Ed was still “leaking buckets.” Jeannine left Ed for a man who abused her, apparently preferring violence to grief. Now Ed sometimes spends the night with Local 302 member Chantal, a woman of fading beauty who men hire in advance to attend their wakes in the role of “mysterious mistress.” Chantal’s talent as a weeper is to make her mascara run.
Ed is drawn to Chantal because she “gets it.” What she gets, what any of the weepers understand about each other that others fail to grasp, is never quite clear. Perhaps they share an understanding that “mourning the dead is always a sight easier than loving the living.”
The story’s point is also a bit fuzzy. Mendelsund makes the point that no other animal cries and that nobody understands why humans do. Perhaps Weepers is meant to suggest that empathy is dying. It may be true that people reserve their empathy for their family and friends, a narrow group that excludes people they define as “the other,” but I don’t think that’s the point Mendelsund is trying to make.
In the novel’s reality, people increasingly became “completely anesthetized, and the multitudes of the angry became psychopathic.” They no longer say “howdy,” they do not marry or reproduce or value education. People on the radio scream at each other. It’s easy to find parallels in current American life, but Weepers, while an entertaining read, is a long road to travel just to learn that we live in a nation divided between the empathic and the uncaring.
Mendelsund’s prose is lively and surprising. I recommend Weepers for that reason and for its amusing takes on the grief industry, notwithstanding a plot that fizzles out before reaching a meaningful destination.
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