Trippy ‘ Bardo’ is brilliantly haunting

Grieving Lincoln haunts Saunders’ debut novel

Lin- Manuel Miranda, what’s on your reading list?

Lincoln in the Bardo ( Random House, 343 pp., out of eeee four), George Saunders’ exhilarating and theatrical novel about a grieving Abraham Lincoln, cries out for a stage adaptation. Who better than the genius behind Hamilton?

Broadway may beckon eventually. In the meantime, readers can revel in Saunders’ brilliantly imagined debut novel, a book that’s heartbreaking and hilarious, at once sui generis yet also ingeniously derivative of narrative traditions dating to Dante.

We shouldn’t expect conventional historical fiction from Saunders, an acclaimed and quirky short story writer who once delivered the unforgettable image of poor women strung up on virtual clotheslines for the amusement of the wealthy.

Told by a chorus of voices in a fast- paced, canto- like style, Lin

coln in the Bardo takes place on the February night in 1862 when the president has buried his favorite son, 11- year- old Willie, who died of typhoid fever. The setting: a cemetery not far from the White House, filled with restless souls stuck in limbo, a la Dante’s

Inferno. ( Bardo is a Tibetan word meaning “intermediate state.”)

Our three primary Danteesque ghostly “guides” are Hans Vollman, felled by a beam before he could bed his much younger bride; Roger Bevins III, a young gay man who committed suicide; and the elderly and mysterious Rev. Everly Thomas. All, despite strange physical manifestations of their decaying states ( Hans, for instance, is encumbered by a giant phallus), are in denial and in no hurry to depart to the final great beyond ( the word “dead” is to be avoided at all costs).

Joining them is a newcomer, young Willie. On this particular evening, a gaunt, shabby figure appears, sobbing; he goes to his son’s mausoleum, opens the coffin and embraces the boy he has lost. This outpouring of love unleashes even more of the grave- yard’s spirits, unaccustomed to such tenderhearted visitors. Willie, meanwhile, can’t understand why his father is gazing upon “a worm the size of a boy / Wearing my suit / Horrors.”

This is typical of Saunders’ fantastical and witty use of language. Coffins, for these determined hangers- on, are “sick- boxes.” ( They’re not dead, remember?) Life is that “previous place.”

For all its divine comedy, Lincoln in the

Bardo also is deep and moving. It is imperative that Hans and Roger help hurry Willie onward (“It is anathema for children to tarry here,” Hans explains) and the grief- stricken president — also weighed down by the burden of the Civil War — is delaying the process.

Such a fresh, subtle take on a great man who has inspired endless reams of copy seems impossible, but Saunders pulls it off. Outside the cemetery gates is a mass grave where slaves are banished. Lincoln’s presence liberates one of them, who literally will haunt the president a year before he signs the Emancipation Proclamation. This is a novel about death that ends beautifully, with hope, however heavy.

I think this is just the beginning for this spectacular book, my early bet for a showering of literary awards.

PHOTOS BY MATHEW BRADY FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS President Abraham Lincoln mourns the loss of his young son in Lincoln in the Bardo.

Willie, the third son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, died at age 11, most likely from typhoid fever.

CHLOE AFTEL Author George Saunders.