The setup
In February 1862, during the first year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever in the White House. His body was placed in a borrowed crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, and newspapers at the time reported that the grieving president returned to the crypt, alone, at night.
Saunders takes that report and builds a novel around one night in that cemetery. Willie finds himself in the bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist term for a state between death and whatever comes next. He isn't alone. The cemetery is crowded with ghosts who don't accept that they're dead, who call their coffins "sick-boxes" and who pass the time arguing, boasting and telling their stories to anyone who'll listen. When the president arrives and holds his son's body, the ghosts are astonished: nobody living has ever come back for one of them like this.
Three ghosts lead the chorus: Hans Vollman, a printer killed by a falling beam just before he could enjoy his young wife; Roger Bevins III, a young man who took his own life and immediately regretted it; and the Reverend Everly Thomas, who knows more about what waits beyond than he'd like to. Together they decide that Willie has to move on, and fast, because children who linger in the bardo come to a very bad end.
What it does well
The form is unlike anything else. The novel is told entirely in short passages from dozens of speakers, each followed by the speaker's name, like a script or an oral history. The ghosts' sections alternate with snippets from historical accounts (letters, memoirs and histories of the Lincoln White House), some real and some invented, and these often contradict each other about small things like the color of the moon that night. It's funny, and then it's a quiet lesson in how history gets made out of unreliable memory.
Saunders's ghosts are a riot. They're vain, crude and stuck on the same few grievances, and the humor gives the book a pulse when it could easily have become solemn. Then, as the night goes on, the jokes start to break your heart. Each ghost is defined by the thing they couldn't let go of in life, and Lincoln's grief, seen through all of them, becomes a way of thinking about how everyone holds on.
And the central image of a father who comes back in the dark to hold his son is as moving as anything in recent fiction. The novel grew out of that one reported detail, and you can feel the whole book bending toward it.
Where it wobbles
The opening is disorienting. It takes a few dozen pages to learn the rules, and some readers give up before the book has a chance to work on them. The many voices can blur together, especially the secondary ghosts, whose bawdy episodes sometimes go on longer than they need to.
The book's crude comedy, set beside a child's death, also lands differently for different readers. We think the mix is the point, since grief is ugly and absurd as well as sad. A few people in our reading group found it jarring all the way through.
How it reads now
Lincoln in the Bardo was Saunders's first novel after decades of acclaimed short stories, and it won the Booker Prize in 2017. Its audiobook became a famous production in its own right, with a cast of well over a hundred voices, and many readers swear by it as the easiest way into the book. If the page version stalls for you, try the audio.
The verdict
Lincoln in the Bardo asks for some patience early and then pays it back many times over. It's a strange, funny, generous book about the people we can't let go of, and it may change how you think about grief. If you've ever lost someone, read it when you're ready. If you haven't, read it anyway, and call your parents after.