Book Review: 'The Removers' by Andrew Meredith

Book Review: 'The Removers' by Andrew Meredith

 

A coming-of-age tale laden with corpses and casual sex, fledging children and family ties, the heft and haulage of life's dead weights.

 

 

By Thomas Lynch in the Wall Street Journal

'Once you put a dead guy in the room," wrote Alan Ball, creator of "Six Feet Under," in an email correspondence we kept up years ago, "you can talk about anything." This, he told me, was the formula he followed with his HBO series. Every episode began with a death and followed the hapless corpse to its final disposition—a pilgrimage from present to former tense that transported and transformed both the living and dead. The show won all available awards.

A similar formula informs "The Removers," Andrew Meredith's debut memoir—a coming-of-age tale laden with corpses and casual sex, fledging children and family ties, the stoop and strain, the heft and haulage of life's dead weights. While the writer learns the hands-on business of body removal and final disposition from his father, the countervailing narratives of his parents' marital discord and his own sexual initiation take place to a soundscape of low-fi, indie-pop oddments such as Pavement's 1990s classic "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." It is a story of following in a father's footsteps, of grunt work and, in time, good will.

Mr. Meredith did not mean to make a career in mortuary work. But, then, neither did his father. An unspecified misconduct with female students resulted in the elder Meredith being fired from the professorial life, banned from consortium with his perpetually aggrieved wife and demoted to the hands-on, on-call, hard labor and human duty of removing bodies from their places of death. The parents' decomposing marriage would prove too rich a compost. "They'd lost that loving feeling in 1990 but stayed together. Instead they kept quiet. They shared a bedroom narrower than the sum of their wingspans. Joyless, they endured. I was certain I would never leave the orbit of their trouble. I had already tried and failed."

Mr. Meredith knows how to make sentences and how to put them in service of paragraphs that broaden the emotional register of his narrative. The reader is edged, inevitably, up and back between the good laugh and good cry by his artful prose. Here is the author describing his and his sister's prelapsarian childhood, aged 15 and 12, before their father's fall from grace: "We are young and alive and together in these days. We are all in exactly the right place. Theresa and I win prizes for our grades. We are as robust as Granny's rosebush. Theresa is a champion gymnast. I am an all-star first baseman. Flourishing among neighbors and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, we are as vibrantly alive and creeping as the honeysuckle between our yard and Betty Lou's . I have eaten the Eucharist. Mom is slender and beautiful with chestnut hair to her shoulders. She has navigated us both into school and now she's been hired to teach the eighth grade at St. Joachim's. Dad writes poems, remodels the house, plays guitar, sings in the living room, coaches my baseball team, plays softball with the other coaches. We take vacations with family and friends. We are young and alive and we have each other."

In 1997, age 22, frustrated by his own lackluster attempts at college or self-reliance, the author asks his father to ask his bosses if they can find him a job at Livery of Frankford, which supplies hearses, limos, drivers and all-hours body-removal services to Philadelphia's plentiful funeral homes. He reckons himself possessed of the needed qualifications for the work: "It didn't sound too hard. I had a driver's license. I wasn't physically disabled. There may have been some questions about whether I was a good fit for this kind of work, but I'd reached financial crisis. I had no choice."

What happens to the author is what happens to ne'er-do-wells of many sorts: to wit, they find themselves capable of showing up, pitching in and doing their part in a variety of unlikely and unlikable jobs, which grow by turns into a life of essential service to fellow humans. And they—we—find the work compelling. Life's a heavy lift, so that even if we show up in our second-hand, Salvation Army suit, as timid ankle grabbers, before long we pick up our part of the load and lend a large muscle, whole body bearing effort to the cause.

It turns out that, by getting the dead where they need to go, the living can get where they need to be. In time Mr. Meredith graduates to the crematory, where he finds, amid the light-industrial, cost-efficient, witness-free disappearance of the dead an apparition of deeper purposes: "After eight years, I now see that I am working for the living. For the first time I am engaging with families in grief, and for the first time I see how important the job has been all along. I start to see the dignity in doing the necessary. I wonder if this is what it means to be a man."

At fewer than 200 pages, "The Removers" take only an afternoon to read, and you are repaid for your trouble with some arcana about mortuary services, crematory operations, the contagion of trouble in a family and the musical tastes of white males in the 1990s. That Andrew Meredith follows his father's footsteps in and out of Philly's morgues makes for a good story. What makes this debut more worthy than most is that the author also follows his father's work in paying attention to the arts and crafts of language: His father, the poet Joseph Meredith—unheralded, unknown, internationally ignored—is, nonetheless, possessed of an authentic gift. His most recent collection, "Inclinations of the Heart," is a rich companion to "The Removers," and makes manifest how Andrew Meredith comes by his wordsmithing honestly.

Mr. Lynch is a writer and funeral director in Michigan. His most recent book, co-authored with the theologian Thomas Long, is "The Good Funeral."