Lincoln in the Bardo

In the moonlit confines of a Georgetown cemetery during a single, fevered night in 1862, George Saunders conjures the bardo—not merely as Tibetan limbo, but as a teeming agora of the unrested dead, where Willie Lincoln, son of the president, lingers in spectral refusal of his grave. The novel unfolds through a mosaic of voices: snippets from historical accounts—letters, diaries, memoirs by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Doris Kearns Goodwin—intercut with the raucous, script-like monologues of ghosts, each clinging to distorted memories of their earthly lives. This formal hybridity, precise and rhythmic, eschews traditional narration; instead, it curates a cacophony that mirrors the fractured nature of mourning itself, drawing Abraham Lincoln into the fray as he cradles his boy's corpse in the mausoleum.

Saunders's ghosts—hansvoll the former slaveholder with his 'fine horse'; the coquettish Miss Traynor, forever primping her spectral form; the matter-of-fact Roger Bevins III, with his multiplied eyes and hands—are no mere wraiths but vibrant grotesques, their banter laced with Saunders's signature pathos and bite. "In my barrow I lay, awaiting shipment south; presently two hooded figures appeared," begins one such testimony, launching into a tale both absurd and heartbreaking. Through these polyvocal eruptions, the novel probes the bardo's central struggle: Willie's soul, contested by benevolent presences urging release and his own filial tether to a grieving father. Lincoln himself emerges not as marble icon but as a man unraveling—stooped, weeping, his presidential weight momentarily shed.

What elevates this beyond historical ventriloquism is Saunders's orchestration of form as theme; the kaleidoscopic voices enact the novel's quiet thesis on love's persistence amid dissolution, how we 'live and love when we know that everything we love must end.' The historical interpolations, cited with mock-scholarly rigor—"His late wife was a person of surpassing beauty"—ground the supernatural in verifiable grief, while the ghosts' escalating frenzy builds to a climactic intervention, Lincoln's nocturnal vigil becoming a conduit for their long-denied transitions. It is theatrical, almost operatic; read aloud, the pages pulse with urgency, Saunders trusting the reader's ear to parse the din.

Yet for all its brilliance, the novel's fourth movement—the massed chorus of ghosts recounting their deaths in a frenzied litany—tests formal limits, devolving at moments into repetitive clamor that mutes individual resonance; what begins as vivid multiplicity sags under sheer volume, as if Saunders, ever the maximalist, cannot resist piling voices until distinction blurs. This excess, while thematically apt for collective unrest, risks exhausting the reader midway, diluting the precision that elsewhere defines his prose. One senses the strain of sustaining 160-odd speakers across 368 pages; a tighter curation might have sharpened the blade without blunting its humanity.

Lincoln in the Bardo endures as a feat of sustained invention, its close reading rewarded by revelations in voice and structure—Saunders has not just written a novel but devised a machine for grieving, one that hums with humor, horror, and hard-won tenderness. It invites rereading, aloud in groups perhaps, to fully inhabit its bardo; in doing so, it reaffirms fiction's power to wrestle eternity into the here-and-now. A book that, like its ghosts, refuses easy repose.