George Saunders is the author of eight books, including the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in Time's list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. You can find Saunders at georgesaundersbooks.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/georgesaundersfans.
In his long-awaited first novel, American literary master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is an experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it. February 1862. The Civil War is less than on year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From the seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented, to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
This novel seems to be praised mostly on two things: the first, its form and the second, it's emotional journey. The form itself is like reading a play, but the speaker's name comes after their piece of "dialogue" or internal monologue, rather than before. For me, that meant it was hard to keep track of who was speaking. Due to the sheer number of ghosts helping narrate the story, I also felt like I was wading through too many voices for a story that should have felt like a clear shot. It was difficult to get emotionally invested in the ghosts narrating the story because as soon as I understood what one ghost/piece was saying, we were jerked to the next ghost/story. The story itself is rather choppy, and it takes a minute to get acclimated to the form—during which time you might lose the first few important threads to understanding the story. And if you lose the threads, like I think I did, then you end up working with the details you are given and trying to build the story up from there. This can make for a rather frustrating reading experience if one really wants to get attached to the story, or for someone who at least is trying their hardest to uncover the genius beneath the avant-garde form.
This does seem like a very emotional novel, with a heart-wrenching journey through loss and grief, and understanding when one's time has come to depart. Having never experienced a loss through death, however, I felt like these emotions flew right over my head, and didn't quite hit where they were expected. A good author would know how to make someone feel like they'd experienced the cornerstone experience of the novel (in this case, losing someone through death) even if they hadn't, and Saunders just did not accomplish that feat. I can attribute this to its choppy form, which doesn't leave much room for longer, emotional sentiments. I can also attribute this to the fact that the story jumps between ghosts too often for a reader to get emotionally invested in any one story, including Lincoln's and Willie's. On the flip-side of this story of personal loss, there is also depictions of the country's loss, through the Civil War. We can't even feel emotionally connected to that here, or at least I couldn't. This tragedy is one that has been taught in history books since our births, yet one that we still can't always fully comprehend. Saunders has a chance here to bring new information to light, or to get readers more emotionally connected to the tragedy, and he doesn't take it. Instead, he depicts the tragedy of the Civil War through numbers that we can't fully comprehend, and with facts that we've heard so many times before, that we've been desensitized to them. I'd really been looking forward to seeing how Lincoln's loss affected how he approached ending the Civil War, and yet that, too, didn't get much of a spotlight at the end.
The book includes chapters where Saunders incorporates quotes from real historical texts, mixed in with some of his own fabricated historical voices. At first, I got the feeling that he did a bunch of research on the time period and wanted to put the best lines he found to use. Once I understood, however, that it was a mix of real and imagined voices (all of which were created with careful authenticity—nothing felt fake), I appreciated the time and effort put into the approach. He really did have to research how different people wrote and how different kinds of people communicated, and the language of the day in which these people were born and raised. I also appreciated how these chapters specifically were all about building an image of Lincoln—what he physically looked like, how he was coping with the loss of his son from the outside, criticism of his choices when outsiders couldn't have known the real story. In some ways, these were the most real parts of the story, in the sense that I felt mostly connected to Lincoln despite having spent more time with the ghosts. However, I do wish Saunders had chosen to incorporate one more chapter at the end utilizing his historical and imagined historical sources—we see Lincoln a bit before and a lot during his loss, but not any accounts of him after the fact. A more satisfying ending would have included the outsiders commenting on him after his loss—did he ever seem to move on, did he always seem to carry it with him, did his loss change his mindset about the war in any tangible way, did knowing Willie had found a better place bring him a sense of outward peace that journalists would have recognized? Answering those questions would have made for a more poignant ending.
The ghosts' stories are so intricate and detailed, and so thoughtful. The main narrators are Roger Bevins III and Hans Vollman, men with interesting pasts who manifest in ghost forms in interesting ways that don't quite make sense until the very end. There is a lot of detail and emphasis on many of the ghosts' stories, in ways that sometimes detracts from the main story of Lincoln and Willie, yet without enough time and development to make you care past the time it takes to listen to any one story. This creates an environment where it's difficult to get invested in the stories or understand why it's important to know what happens to each ghost, other than the two or three recurring ghosts. In the end, this book seems like it has really profound statements on life, loss, death, and grief if one really can stick themselves in the narrative and painstakingly keep track of every tiny detail until the end, but since the form is so experimental and does not allow itself to get attached to any one character, it means that readers, too, cannot find a way to get attached, unless they have the shared experience and emotions to attach them to all of the characters.
You can find more of George Saunders at georgesaundersbooks.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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