Reimagining Lincoln’s grief, legacy
As the nation convulsed with sorrow in the early years of the Civil War, the grief of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, was intensified by the death of their young son William (Willie) Wallace Lincoln from typhoid fever in 1862.The boy’s body was interred in a crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, and as newspapers of the day reported, his father visited the crypt to cradle his son’s body.
George Saunders has reimagined this private moment in his polyphonic masterpiece “Lincoln in the Bardo,” the winner of the 2018 Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Fiction. Saunders, with his distinctive genius, has rendered an American icon at a critical moment in history. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a debut novel for Saunders, though he has long been heralded as one of the great short story writers of his time.
Saunders’ novel centers on his brilliant, bawdy and wise chorus of characters, who together resemble the full scale of human existence. It takes place in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist term for the “intermediate state,” the transitional zone to reincarnation, with a motley, loquacious community of ghosts. With a supernatural touch, Saunders has rearranged historical nuggets, dialogue between fictional characters, parts of journals, essays and letters of the day, some verbatim and some invented. The form evokes Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” or even oral histories, like those of a previous Heartland winner (for nonfiction), Studs Terkel, with whom Saunders shares a generosity of spirit.
With no narrative glue, or narrator, this necropolis comes to life. The ghosts in the graveyard range from enslaved people to drunkards and respectable businessmen, lingering in the world because they can’t face dying. But the risk is high because they are re-enacting their deaths to the point of insanity, while others are disfigured because they failed to act on their hopes and dreams when they were alive. Willie refuses
to depart, sitting cross-legged on his tomb, waiting for his father in this “hospital yard” until he must go.
Innovative in structure, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which also won last year’s Man Booker Prize, is about life and death, about grief and rebirth, and ultimately about the radical act of transformation deeply connected with the power of empathy. This radiant and slightly surreal novel challenges the realism so often associated with the literature of the heartland, but it also enlarges that tradition with a new perspective on our 16th president. Readers feel Lincoln’s struggle and witness his growing resolve to end the war as quickly as possible, even if that would mean more immediate bloodshed. With this supernatural layer to history, with the chorus of ghosts, “Lincoln in the Bardo” speaks to the universal plight of humanity and grief, casting it in a mythical light.
Elizabeth Taylor, Tribune literary editor-atlarge, is past president of the National Book Critics Circle and serves on its board of directors.