Lincoln in the Bardo

(by George Saunders)

This is another one of those “I’ve been meaning to read this for ages/I’m glad I finally got around to it” books. In terms of its structure (which includes a chorus of voices of dead people in a cemetery) this reminded me a bit of The Dirty Dust by Máirtín Ó Cadhain (and there are some similar moments of humor and pettiness), but this one, which has the illness and death of Abraham Lincoln’s son as its precipitating event, has a distinctly American setting and its own take on grief, stubbornness, community, and unity/division. Here, the dead are stuck in the in-between place of the Bardo because they can’t/won’t accept that they’re dead, often because they’re fixated on some specific thing from life: one character died just before consummating his marriage and can’t let go of the idea of that; another character took his own life and wishes he hadn’t and can’t let go of all the beautiful things in the world that he’ll never experience again. Meanwhile, the nature of the Bardo in this book is such that if young people linger there, they get stuck, so part of the plot involves a concerned trio of dead guys (the two mentioned above plus a man who was a member of the clergy in life) trying to keep Lincoln’s son from that fate. The sections of the book that consist of the voices of the people in the Bardo are interspersed with quotes (I think a mix of real and fictional though I’m not 100% sure about that) that comment on the events leading up to and following Willie Lincoln’s death, and that comment on Lincoln’s presidency and character and the state of the nation as the death toll of the Civil War starts to mount. The way that the book is made of many short snippets of text really works for me, and makes longer passages stand out, which I think Saunders uses to excellent effect. There are so many great parts of this book, but I especially loved the voice of Roger Bevins III, the character who killed himself: there are lots of lists of really lovely images in his narration, like “swarms of insects dancing in slant-rays of August sun; a trio of black horses standing hock-deep and head-to-head in a field of snow; a waft of beef broth arriving breeze-borne from an orange-hued window on a chill autumn” or “a cloud passing ship-like above a rounded green hill, atop which a line of colored shirts energetically dance in the wind” or “Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead.” I also loved the glimpses of various other inhabitants of the Bardo, including “Trevor Williams, former hunter, seated before the tremendous heap of all the animals he had dispatched in his time […] each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a period ranging from several hours to several months” or a rich man who is “constantly compelled to float horizontally, like a human compass needle, the top of his head facing in the direction of whichever of his properties he found himself most worried about at the moment.”