Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Random House, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0812985405

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Lincoln in the Bardo can be described as an American ghost story, but there is much more to it than ghosts in a graveyard. It’s not a book to zip through once and put down with the confidence that you have completely absorbed what it has to offer. Trying to describe it, and review it, has been difficult, but it is worth it. George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for literary fiction for this novel, but don’t let that influence whether you try it for yourself.

At the center of the story is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, and Lincoln’s grieving alone at night in the cemetery where Willie was laid to rest, although “laid to rest” isn’t really the best description for its residents. I didn’t know this, but a “bardo” is a Buddhist term for a kind of in-between or transitional state. The cemetery’s residents, who tell the majority of the story, are stuck in that transitional state, no longer alive but unable and unwilling to move on or even recognize that they are dead. When Willie arrives in the bardo, the other residents, based on their previous experience, expect that he will quickly move on, but when Lincoln returns to grieve, he promises to visit again, and Willie stays to make sure he is there when his father returns. Of course, as a ghost, he is unable to physically interact with his environment or with living people, and it isn’t as easy as it might seem for him to stay, especially without the help of the other ghosts of the cemetery. In fact, if he doesn’t move on, he may be taken by damned souls.

The narrative structure of the book is challenging. It alternates between sections that take place in the cemetery, with a variety of ghosts attempting to move the story forward, or include their own story, or push their way in, interrupting each other and editorializing on events and each other, and collections of multiple historical eyewitness accounts of the same events, mostly descriptions and opinions of the night Willie died and of Lincoln himself.

The parts in the cemetery can be very confusing, as the speakers (and there are many) are only named after they have spoken, so it’s not always clear who is telling the story. The reader certainly does get to see the democracy of death in America, though–  cemeteries include all kinds of people, from the repellent and hateful to decent and caring(and sometimes all of it in one person), but in this time, at the beginning of the Civil War, African-Americans are buried outside the fence and their ghosts have to rush the fence and fight off hateful racists to get in. Once they are in, many of them do speak up, and they remain some of the most powerful and lasting voices in the story.

The alternating sections of compiled contemporary eyewitness accounts are probably what was most fascinating to me. Many of them contradict each other: some are sympathetic, complimentary, or admiring, while others condemn him in the strongest terms. To see history, and Lincoln, through so many different eyes, is fascinating, and connects with Lincoln’s interior dialogue and terrible grief for both his own son, and for all of the sons he will be sending onto bloody battlefields, as imagined by Saunders. Even if the cemetery story is too much for you, I recommend at least looking through the book to see these accounts. About two-thirds of the way through you will find absolutely scathing comments and letters as bad as anything you can find about our president on the Internet.

While Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a novel of historical fiction, or a portrait of grief, it can be funny, foul, and sometimes gross (I was not expecting a poop joke four pages in). There are many moments of tenderness, and, despite the grief, horror, denial, and anger that emerge in the cemetery, it is also hopeful for those in the bardo, and for freedom in America.

If you like your narratives to be straightforward, this is probably not the book for you. But if you are willing to try out this unusual narrative structure, and do some rereading for better understanding, this is a ghost story you won’t soon forget.

Contains: racial slurs, suicide, references to rape and child molestation.