George saunders re-imagines a president's grief with 'lincoln in the bardo'

Willie Lincoln was only 11 when he died in February 1862 of typhoid fever. The Lincolns' third son was said to be their favorite, and after Willie was interred in a borrowed mausoleum

in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, his father, Abraham Lincoln, returned to that cemetery several times. Newspapers reported that the president visited the crypt to open his son's

coffin and hold his body. It's that image, of Lincoln cradling the corpse of his beloved son in a Pietà pose, that inspires George Saunders' first novel, called_ Lincoln in the

Bardo._ Though it's early to say, I feel pretty safe in predicting that this is going to be one of the year's most acclaimed novels. _Lincoln in the Bardo_ is searing, inventive

and bizarre. This is Saunders, after all, whose imagination effortlessly mashes together the hell-fire visions of Hieronymus Bosch with crude Middle-School anatomical humor and the deadpan

surrealism of Rod Serling. There's always method to Saunders' madness, and here it forces readers to realize, as if for the first time, the ultimate oddness of our own existence;

namely, that there's an end to it; that we and everyone we love are going to die. The action of _Lincoln in the Bardo_ is mostly confined within the iron gates of Oak Hill Cemetery

(which still exists, by the way.) A voice, identified as one "hans vollman" opens the novel with a reminiscence: "On our wedding day," [hans tells us] I was forty-six,

she was eighteen." Another voice, that of one elise traynor soon announces, "I was too early departed." Saunders' chatty dead are stuck in what Tibbetan Buddhists call

"the bardo" — a limbo-like state where the fears and desires they harbored when they were alive are magnified. Saunders goes on to amplify this central idea of being stuck: the

newly interred Willie is trapped in the bardo by his yearning to keep seeing his father, during those heartbreaking pilgrimages Lincoln pays to the crypt; Lincoln himself is stranded in

grief; and, of course, the nation finds itself stalled in a transitional state, mired in the blood and gore of the Civil War. The impossibility and, yet, the dire necessity of moving on are

the opposing forces that wrestle with each other in this profound novel. If this overview makes _Lincoln in the Bardo_ seem too static, too reminiscent of that sluggish classic _Spoon River

Anthology,_ be assured that the wild plot swerves of Saunders' short stories have been transplanted and multiplied in his debut novel: Old Testament angels (who may be demons in

disguise) pay the cemetery dwellers an apocalyptic visit; the ghosts of slaves rise up from their segregated "sick boxes" (as the dead call their coffins) just outside the iron

gates and integrate the lily-white Oak Hill Cemetery; and in a moving climactic scene, the legions of the dead swarm the unknowing Lincoln when he visits Willie. Saunders' speaks in a

hundred tongues here, concocting words like "skim walking" to describe the peculiar way the dead navigate the cemetery and taking us deep into Lincoln's grief. Here are some

of Lincoln's staccato thoughts, as he sits in that mausoleum, holding Willie and grappling with his death and the mounting deaths of the Civil War: One thing bothers me about this

extraordinary novel — more of a question, really, than a quibble. Throughout _Lincoln in the Bardo_, Saunders intersperses chapters packed with quotes from historical sources. He gives

citations for these historical sources and some are legit — like Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on Lincoln, for instance. But other sources are made up. All the historical passages are

tossed together indiscriminately. It's not like Saunders is doing anything new here: novelists have been playing with historical narrative since the term "postmodern" was

invented. But, I wonder if just in the past couple of months, our taste and tolerance for this kind of melding of fact and fiction has diminished? Like I say, it's a question.

What's not a question is the achievement of _Lincoln in the Bardo._ Like the president who graces its pages, it's monumental. Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh

Air.