The Removers

June 30, 2014
In this potent memoir, Meredith begins a career as a handler of the dead following a scandal that shatters his family when his is only 14. His father, a professor of literature, is accused of sexual harassment and fired. Meredith's devastated mother withdraws, and Meredith and his sister are left floundering through the remainder of their youth. Flunking out of college, Meredith first works with his father removing the bodies of the deceased from their homes. He then gets a job at Brotherly Love Cremation, and describes the grim details of his work. During this period of his life, Meredith is numb, likening himself to a possum: "The possum is a coward. He avoids conflict by disengaging, by hiding behind his open eyes. He cleans up the dead. He eats carrion so we don't have to smell it, see it, catch its disease." Careening through women and drink, Meredith describes without emotion the girls he uses and dumps, the demise of his Philadelphia neighborhood, and the violent deaths of several guys he knew from high school. The "festival of death" at work every day stirs no feelings in him about life. Change doesn't seem to be within his power, and he fears he might become his father. Realizing that "picking one thing to be" might be his salvation, he writes in the final pages that he can see his work as a service to others, a mercy, although this bright wrap-up seems a bit too neatly contrived given what comes before.

July 1, 2014
Meredith's debut remembers the years he worked as a remover, answering pages from funeral homes to retrieve a (usually recently) dead body somewhere in Philadelphia and take it somewhere else, donning a thrift-store black suit, and negotiating the technicalities of moving a person in this most sensitive and final state. He's living with his parents during the painful silence a period in which his parents remain together after his professor-poet father is fired for vague sexual misconduct. What starts as an antidote to broke-nessworking alongside his dad, who had picked up the job for the same reasonbecomes a decade-long meander when he's hired full-time at a crematory. Everything around him is dying or dead: his parents' love for one another, his crime-ridden neighborhood and the Philadelphia he knows, and the bodies, the bodies, the bodies. Andnot an irony lost on himthis is when he learns about life. Meredith's retro-glance is aware and wise, a baffling, relatable reckoning with city, family, and self. Full-hearted with an often charmingly restrained humor, Meredith's voice is quite welcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)