Voices from the Grave
How does a parent deal with the death of a child? Worse, how does a parent deal with the death of a child when the country they lead is embroiled in a bloody conflict—and they must grieve while condemning the sons of others to their own deaths? Highly regarded for his short stories, George Saunders wrestles with these questions in his stylish, if occasionally sentimental and overlong, first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Set during the American Civil War, the novel begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-yearold son, Willie.
Historical accounts tell of the president’s profound grief, of the nights he spent at his son’s temporary grave in Washington. “My poor boy,” Lincoln was reported to have grieved, “he was too good for this earth. God has called him home.” A former slave who washed and dressed young Willie’s body observed that Lincoln’s “tall frame convulsed with emotion”. In Saunders’s novel, Willie is in purgatory: the “bardo” of the title is a reference to the Buddhist idea of an intervening space between the end of this life and rebirth in the next. Saunders’s conceit is that the souls confined to this spectral antechamber cannot resolve themselves to their deaths, have unfinished business and are perhaps unaware that they are finally, irrevocably dead.
Willie waits for his father to take him home: “Bursting out of the doorway, the lad took off... look of joy on his face.” But, hoping to be swept up into his father’s arms, Willie passes straight through as if his father were a hologram. Willie’s journey to understanding that he is dead is one strand of the novel. Another is President Lincoln’s own journey towards understanding, towards empathy. There are several other strands to this inventive, linguistically exuberant novel, mostly involving the lives and deaths of several other characters in bardo, a sort of grisly chorus who tell us their stories while watching, as we do, Lincoln and Willie.
Lincoln in the Bardo is bricolage, a novel of sundries brought together in an affecting, if not altogether convincing, whole.