SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
In a world where just about everyone may worry they'll soon be replaced by smart machines, a cowboy poet named Ed has seemed to find enduring work in a small, dying town in the American Southwest. He is a weeper - a member of Local 302, a union of workers hired to mourn at funerals. As Ed muses...
PETER MENDELSUND: (Reading) Misery loves company, but hey, at least we were miserable, which counts as a feeling. And most people these days cannot manage even that - sentiment of any kind. And so it was, and is. And thus, we do all the feeling for them.
SIMON: That is Peter Mendelsund, the novelist and designer who's also creative director at The Atlantic. He joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
MENDELSUND: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: Are the weepers feeling or acting like they're feeling?
MENDELSUND: I think it's a range. You know, I think that everybody in this particular union who does this work - I mean, it's obviously a magic realist conceit that this is a normalized thing in this country, although I gather that it is a normalized profession in other countries.
SIMON: It's been going on for centuries, right? I mean, moirologists in Greece. Yeah.
MENDELSUND: Yes, or in Lamentations in the Bible. It goes back as far as you can possibly imagine. But I think the idea here in the novel, which is really an allegory, is that these people, they don't really have to act, that there is something that they're born with, that it's a God-given - I don't want to call it (laughter) - it's either a talent or a liability, but at least it pays the bills.
Strangely, a couple of weeks ago I was with a friend from work, and I can't remember what the bit was that I was performing at the time but involved me getting sad over something that didn't really require me being sad. (Laughter) And I sort of faked crying, and honest to God, the tears just came out. And I thought, holy cow, like, I can make myself sad if I want to. Don't ask me to do it right now.
SIMON: Oh, no, I - well, all right. You anticipate me. Tell us about the state of the world that you describe here. It's not too far away from what we're living now.
MENDELSUND: Yeah. You know, the idea really behind the book is that it's hard not to be aware that we're living in a particularly rough moment, and that could be - there's a million things you could be worried about - but, you know, the death of democracy, the death of the planet. And it seems like - I mean, this is a simplification - but there're sort of two approaches in terms of contending with this. I think we sort of live in an age of anger and an age of anhedonia or anesthesia. So the idea here is that these folks - this particular cohort of sensitives - their job in a way is to both do the feeling for the population as a whole but also to encourage the population to keep those pores open, to still be in touch, as it were, with healthy feelings - you know, joy and sadness.
And as someone who is himself, I would say, an overly sensitive person, it's quite the lift for me to have to support all of this knowledge about the downward trend, essentially, for humanity. A couple of years ago, when I was writing this book, I was coming out of a sort of devastating series of rolling depressions, and it got me thinking. I mean, if you write fiction, whatever you're feeling is going to get you thinking. It got me thinking about, what's the point of all of this oversensitivity? I know other people feel it. Who are they? Who are we? Is there a service that we can offer? And so that's sort of the genesis of the book.
SIMON: Tell us about the kid who comes into this group - that's what he's called. He seems to have a special gift for the work, doesn't he?
MENDELSUND: Yeah. The novel is a messianic novel. The kid is this messianic figure who sort of wanders out of the wilderness. He joins up with this union of weepers, and sort of as soon as he - the kid begins to work, Ed sees this tremendous uptick in feeling in the entire community. He has a preternatural ability to make people cry. As it turns out, he has a preternatural ability to make people feel all kinds of things.
SIMON: Yeah.
MENDELSUND: But Ed sees this. I mean, Ed is sort of his John the Baptist. You know, he's one of his first apostles. He sees this coming and just sort of wants to shout to the heavens, like, here is a miracle. This kid comes unto us, and he brings with him this power to unlock all of that feeling that's been suppressed. All of the numbness, he makes it go away in a miraculous fashion. There's no mechanic that Ed can see. It's just a supernatural ability.
SIMON: You're a designer, a classical pianist, a creative director at The Atlantic, as well as a novelist. To state the obvious, for somebody who struggles with depression, you're awfully productive.
MENDELSUND: (Laughter) I get this. I get this from people. It's sort of what my body does. And I think that you'd need a team of therapists to sort unlock why that is. But even as I was sort of army crawling my way through this deep depression, I was living at the time with my family in a remote part of New Hampshire, and I drove to a Home Depot to pick up some supplies, and I saw Michael's - the crafting store. And God knows why, I went in and just got a bunch of cheap acrylics and pre-primed canvases. And I think about it all the time. It was an unbidden urge from nowhere. So I think a lot of the productivity is just - for me, it's a little like breathing. It just kind of happens. I can't stop it if I wanted to.
SIMON: As I got to the end of this novel, I found myself contending with thoughts about an afterlife - like, is there one?
MENDELSUND: Yeah. And so does the narrator. I'm happy to hear that that is a response that you had. He himself is nearing his end, and it's very natural for somebody who is ill and approaching their death to be preoccupied with that question. You know, I just was a caretaker for my own mother, who passed in November, and got to see it up close. And it is one of the key aspects of the end of the book because the narrator's contending with it, but also, having witnessed the - for want of a better word, the miracles that "the kid," quote-unquote, brings to this town, he starts to think for the first time that maybe his notions about everything there is - that might be incomplete. He begins to open his mind to the idea of the miraculous. So by the time it ends, I think we leave Ed in a mysterious place where he's asking questions that I think are healthy questions to ask.
SIMON: Peter Mendelsund. His new novel, "Weepers." Thank you so much for being with us.
MENDELSUND: Thank you for having me.
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