Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
Summary
In February 1862 Abraham Lincoln's eleven year old son Willie died of typhoid, and Lincoln reportedly returned to the crypt more than once to hold the body. Saunders takes that night and builds a novel out of it.
Willie arrives in the bardo, a Buddhist term for the state between one life and the next, which here is the Georgetown cemetery, populated by souls who refuse to accept that they are dead. They describe their coffins as sick boxes and expect to go home. They talk constantly, over each other, in hundreds of short attributed fragments, and their unfinished business is comic, filthy, tender and unbearable by turns.
Interleaved with them are quotations from historical accounts of the period, some real and some invented, contradicting each other about the weather and the colour of the president's eyes.
It looks completely unreadable and it is not. The fragments are short, the voices distinguish themselves quickly, and after twenty pages the form disappears. Do not try to read it silently at speed; it is built for the ear, and the audiobook with its enormous cast is one of the few genuinely improved by the format.
Underneath the invention it is a plain book about a father who cannot put his child down, and about a country a year into a war that is about to kill six hundred thousand more sons.
It is short, it is much easier than it looks, and it is one of the few genuinely experimental novels that a reader who does not care for experiments still tends to love.
Historical Context & Significance
Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize in 2017, and George Saunders became only the second American to win it, three years after the prize opened to writers of any nationality.
Lola Young, chairing the judges, called it utterly original and praised a form and style that produce a witty and intelligent narrative, describing a tale of haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Lincoln's young son that explores the meaning and experience of empathy.
It was Saunders's first novel after three decades as one of the most admired short story writers in America, which shaped its reception: much of the commentary treated it as a short story writer's novel, built from fragments because that is how its author thinks. The audiobook, recorded with a cast of well over a hundred narrators, became a phenomenon of its own.