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What it argues
Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over a single night in February 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt where his eleven-year-old son Willie has just been buried. The "bardo" of the title is the Tibetan Buddhist concept of an intermediate state between death and rebirth, and Saunders populates it with the ghosts of the dead who occupy Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown — souls who have not yet accepted that they are dead, clinging to their former lives with increasingly baroque self-deceptions. Into this congregation of the unquiet dead comes the grief of a father who cannot bring himself to leave his son.
The novel is structured in hundreds of short sections, alternating between the voices of three main ghost narrators — Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and the Reverend Everly Thomas — and passages of historical quotation assembled from real and invented sources about Lincoln's life, the party he held the night Willie fell ill, and the war consuming the country. The form is deliberately disorienting, especially at first: you are reading a crowd of voices interrupting each other, providing commentary on events, disagreeing about what they saw. It reads less like a novel than like the transcription of a haunting.
What it gets right
- 1.
The bardo's ghosts cling to life through elaborate self-deception — Vollman believes he is in a 'sick box,' Bevins that he is simply ill. The novel uses this to examine how long we deny what we already know.
- 2.
Lincoln's grief is amplified and contextualized by the mass grief of the Civil War, which the novel insists he must hold simultaneously with his private loss.
- 3.
The historical pastiche sections undercut the idea of a single authoritative account of Lincoln — every source contradicts every other, and the 'real' Lincoln emerges from the aggregate noise.
What it covers
Who wrote it
George Saunders is an American author best known for his darkly comic short fiction, collected in volumes including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Tenth of December, and Liberation Day. He taught creative writing at Syracuse University for decades. Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017, was his first novel and won the Man Booker Prize. He has also written the craft essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which emerged from his graduate fiction teaching. He is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive stylists in American short fiction.
