I started reading George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo a few months back, but during the semester I find it almost impossible to read for pleasure. If I read all day, I don’t want to open a book when I get home. But the semester is over, and I’m flying to Spain for a workshop on walking art, and when I travel, I spend the dead time in airports and aircraft with a book. My bags end up heavier than I’d like, because they’re full of books. Yes, I could load them all onto my phone, and I do have quite a few on this device, but it’s not the same. When I get to Barcelona, I’ll probably mail home the ones I’ve finished. Including this one, which I started this morning and could not put down.
What an astonishing novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is like nothing I’ve ever read. The impossible imagination required to come up with the premise, never mind the ability to realize it and the astonishing research it required—I am flabbergasted.
It’s hard to describe the story without spoiling it, but I’ll try. Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over one night in 1862: the night after the funeral of Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever. Lincoln is one of the characters, but we only see him indirectly, through quotations from histories and biographies (some actual, and some, I think, invented, but I could be wrong about that), and through the words of the ghosts trapped in the cemetery, unwilling to accept they’re dead and refusing to make their journeys to the spirit world. Willie is one of them. He wants to remain close to his father, to continue to experience his love. And Lincoln’s love for his children knows no limits.
It’s the lowest point of Lincoln’s life—Willie is dead, the Civil War is going badly, he’s facing tremendous criticism for the intensifying combat and the resulting casualties—but the resident spirits are having their own crises, too. Saunders is a Buddhist—I first heard of him when he appeared on Dan Harris’s meditation podcast, 10% Happier—and the book takes the ideas of non-attachment and the inevitability of suffering seriously. By clinging to life—their own, for the spirits, and Willie’s, for Lincoln—all the characters are increasing their pain. Only by accepting the impermanence of everything can suffering become manageable. “At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end,” one of the ghosts realizes, noting that it’s our nature to be “suffering, limited beings.” That seems accurate, even if it’s kind of a downer.
But Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t a Buddhist tract. By the end of, I cared deeply for all these odd characters, and found myself moved by what happens to them. It’s astonishing, given the number of characters (a note at the back says that the audiobook required 166 actors) and the strangeness of its structure. You might think that the filters between us and the characters—the fragments of history and (maybe) firsthand accounts, many of which disagree with each other; the oddness of the ghosts; the way Lincoln is presented through both halves of the narrative; the rendering of mid-nineteenth century English, in its formality and sometimes tortured orthography—might limit the novel’s emotional intensity, but they don’t.
No wonder this book won the Man Booker Prize. I can’t wait to read more from George Saunders.