Ed is a cowboy poet in the desert Southwest. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s not clear at first what the group should make of the newly arrived \u201ckid,\u201d a scrawny, taciturn presence who joins them for memorial services, intermittently, and who\u2014though he doesn\u2019t ever cry himself\u2014contains 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\u2019s own anxieties? All of the above, perhaps. Ed soon becomes the mysterious young man\u2019s booster, apologist, protector, fan, friend, bail-payer, even matchmaker. Ed\u2019s voice throughout the novel is darkly funny, wry, perceptive\u2014charming. 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ed is a cowboy poet in the desert Southwest. He\u2019s 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\u2019s found a calling in late middle age as a linchpin of Local 302, the Weepers, who go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}