I have to say upfront that I’ve been a Saunders fan since CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, so I jumped to order this book as soon as I saw it. It’s his first novel, and it’s very Saunders-like — meaning that it’s not like anything he’s done before, because that’s how he does things.
It’s written in an unusual voice, which I found a little disorienting and difficult to follow at first. But once you get it, it flows. The story is told by numerous characters and narrators, both contemporaneous characters and historical sources and commentators looking back on the events from the near present. It feels like a play, with characters speaking in turn as much to the audience as to each other.
The central event is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie. Willie dies at the end of his father’s first year in office, as the Civil War, and the horrors of the war, ramp up. President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were devastated by their son’s death, and haunted by guilt that they hadn’t done enough to prevent it as Willie’s sickness worsened.
Willie has arrived in a kind of limbo — the bardo — after his death. This limbo is populated by a whole array of characters, many of whom have been there for decades, never able to accept that they have died. For many, some issue, grievance, or unfinished business in general prevents them from letting go of their lives.
In Willie’s case, the unwillingness to let go comes from both sides. His father cannot let go of Willie, visiting and staying by his resting place, even taking him from the crypt back into his arms. And Willie is simply taken before he is ready, not letting go of his father, longing to have his father feel his touch.
Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III are seemingly permanent residents of the bardo. They take a special interest in Willie. Normally children as young as Willie don’t stay in the bardo very long, but Willie is a special case. Lincoln provides the view of Willie from life, the child stolen away too early and maybe avoidably. Vollman and Bevins provide the view from the other side, where Willie is not in heaven but lost in this limbo, from which he can’t touch the living world or be touched by the father he left behind.
Vollman and Bevins try to help Willie, although the help he really needs, letting go of life, is something they can’t even do for themselves. At the same time, they try to help the president, bringing him together with his son so that each can accept Willie’s death, so that Willie can let go of life and Lincoln can let go of death.
All of this happens in parallel with the events of the Civil War, a virtual flood of death itself. Willie’s death and Lincoln’s reaction to it come at the same time that so many are grieving the deaths of so many, under the orders of Lincoln himself. The preident feels the shock of a son’s death while the war’s losses are shocking the mothers and fathers of sons fighting the war, the war that Lincoln feels responsibility for and that he and his critics are seeing go horribly wrong at this stage.
The images of Lincoln that Saunders presents, overcome and paralyzed by grief, paint a picture of a depressed president being tested. He must have been tempted to try to end the war and the deaths that are doing to countless parents what Willie’s death is doing to him.
Willie and all the dead in the bardo teach Lincoln about the commonality of suffering and the reality of death. When he does let go of Willie, he lets go of grief’s paralysis, for himself and his presidency. He turns a corner away from grief and sorrow and toward resolve.
The dead learn a similar resolve. Willie breaks the taboo of the bardo when he says, “Everyone, we are dead!”
One measure of a book is its emotional effect. I think this is an oddly inspiring book. “Oddly” because so much of it is about death. But it’s also about an attitude — moving forward and not clinging to things that are over and done with. That goes not only for death but for all the changes we go through within life.
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Rewarding
This book was not easy to get into, but once I did, and I admit I had to double back a few times, it was a most rewarding reading experience. There are 166 characters.I suppose one could categorize this book as historical fiction, with a heavy emphasis on "historical." The book quotes from a few texts in the public domain, but makes up quotes create a sense of verisimilitude, quite effectively, I'd say.For quite some time I've been interested in the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps my favorite book about this period is Doris Kearns Goodwin's A TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. That book brought home to me the extremely high mortality rate of children and women in childbirth in the nineteenth century. And so this imagined death and brief afterlife in the bardo of Willy Lincoln as well as the comparisons/commentary about the carnage of the Civil War were poignant.
Top reviews from other countries
TMF
Texte très original. Livraison parfait.
Reviewed in France on November 11, 2023Sally81
Fabulous book and even better audiobook - check it out!
Reviewed in Canada on June 7, 2020K Hauser-Askalani
El libro bien. El precio del envío un robo!
Reviewed in Mexico on September 5, 2018