A bittersweet tale of love, laughs and life in the cold stone house of Willie Lincoln
Lincoln in the Bardo, the talk of the literary world in 2017 and winner of the Man Booker Prize, is an extraordinary experiment in writing. It is also, by turns, riveting, frustrating, funny, heartbreaking, bewildering and ultimately very, very beautiful.
George Saunders’ writing has that effect on you. Like some other literary luminaries— Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy — Saunders’ writing can be a struggle. He’s no Dan Brown.
His last lauded work, Tenth of December in 2013, included stories that were near perfect and others that seemed written by an alien and unreadable. At times, Lincoln in the Bardo veered between these two poles and I felt inclined to abandon the book.
The complicated narrative structure and difficulty in keeping the characters straight almost made me close the book. Reading should be fun after all, right? Life is torturous enough — I don’t need to add to my problems.
Fortunately, I read past those few bumpy passages and reached the bitter and beautiful end. I’m so glad I did and would encourage anyone else struggling through this book to stick with it.
The setup and inspiration for this book is well-known. Saunders had heard the story of a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln entering the crypt of his beloved son Willie on several occasions and holding the boy’s body. His imagination seized on the beauty of the image of the president against the moonlight, his son’s body across his lap.
Saunders places that image and story in the larger context of the bardo, which according to Tibetan tradition is the state of existence between death and rebirth. Accordingly, he peoples his story with a kind of Greek chorus of individuals who observe and participate in this strange ritual and reveal their own stories: sad, funny, tragic and moving. The two key characters are hans vollman and roger bevins iii (the characters’ names are always in lower case), two erudite and intelligent commentators, but there are a whole host of others with varying levels of literacy and sophistication.
What’s astonishing is that Saunders makes them all sound so authentic. So we have bevins channelling Edgar Allan Poe when he says,
Ruinmore, ruinmore, we felt, must endeavour not to ruinmore.
Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.
And we have vollman’s brilliant imagery in describing this scene with Willie Lincoln:
Letting out a shout of exertion, he began to pull, and soon, like a foal newly born (as wet, as untidy), the lad tumbled out, and for a second we were able to clearly observe, inside the ruptured carapace, the imprint of the Reverend’s face, which had not, I am happy to say, in those final instants, reverted back to the face we had so long associated with him (badly frightened, eyebrows high, the mouth a perfect O of terror), but rather, his countenance now conveyed a sense of tentative hopefulness — as if he were going into that unknown place content that he had, at any rate, while in this place, done all that he could.
Others resort to profanity and baser levels of literacy. In total, 166 ghosts tell the story, according to one account.
Saunders further mixes things up by introducing chapters quoting passages from books in which people — real or imagined, it’s hard to tell which is which — have something to say about the Lincoln tragedy. So the reader gets different perspectives on Abraham Lincoln’s looks and the effect Willie’s death had on him and his wife Mary. For instance, one book by Francis F. Browne notes after the funeral that, “The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world” and another observer concurs that he had the “saddest eyes of any human being that I have ever seen.”
Lincoln in the Bardo is a book about suffering, both in this world and the next. And it’s about overcoming grief and sacrifice — whether a family’s private pain or of a nation divided — and, ironically, life itself. It is no Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter world of the undead but a vision of an otherworld that feels astonishly real and close to us.
Without wanting to spoili anything — but how can you spoil a work in which you know everyone is dead? — the one big glaring problem with Lincoln in the Bardo comes near the end when young Willie reveals something that should have been obvious to one and all: they are all dead, not “sick” as most of the inhabitants of the bardo believe.
That it takes an 11-year-old boy to come to that realization after hearing his father use the word “dead” during a conversation with someone struck me as far-fetched and sentimental.
Such a slip is easily forgivable and forgotten when the reader gets carried away by the story and pitch-perfect prose in a passage like this one, from a book of Civil War Letters describing a pivotal moment in Willie’s funeral:
& only imagine the pain of that, Andrew, to drop one’s precious son into that cold stone like some broken bird & be on your way.
Claudio D’Andrea has been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
