Editors Reads Verdict
Lincoln in the Bardo is one of contemporary fiction's most formally ambitious novels — a polyphonic narrative mixing historical documents, invented testimony, and ghost voices to explore grief, parenthood, and the cost of war. Saunders's virtuosity is evident throughout, but the form occasionally dominates the feeling, and readers willing to surrender to its unusual demands will find a genuinely moving meditation on loss.
What We Loved
- The formal innovation — historical documents fragmenting the ghost narrative — is executed with extraordinary control
- The Bardo spirits are each distinctly characterized and often achingly funny as well as sad
- Lincoln's grief is portrayed with historical grounding and genuine emotional weight
- The novel connects personal grief to the national grief of the Civil War without heavy-handedness
Minor Drawbacks
- The experimental form creates a reading experience that is disorienting, particularly in the first third
- The emotional impact is sometimes muted by the stylistic distance
- Readers who need conventional narrative structure will struggle
Key Takeaways
- → The Bardo concept (from Tibetan Buddhism) — the transitional state between death and what follows — provides a space where grief can be examined outside time
- → Parental grief is one of the most universal human experiences, and Lincoln's loss humanizes an icon
- → The fragmentary documentary form mirrors how history actually reaches us — partial, contradictory, filtered through many perspectives
- → Saunders suggests that Lincoln's personal grief and his national grief were inseparable
- → The dead in the Bardo refuse to leave because they cannot accept what they have lost — a metaphor for grief's resistance to reality
| Author | George Saunders |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Random House |
| Pages | 368 |
| Published | February 14, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Literary fiction readers comfortable with formal experimentation, Saunders fans graduating from his short fiction, and readers interested in historical Lincoln material approached from an unexpected angle. |
The Most Formally Ambitious Novel of Its Decade
George Saunders spent two decades writing some of the finest short fiction in American literature before producing his debut novel, and Lincoln in the Bardo arrives with the ambition of someone who has been thinking about the form for a very long time. The novel takes place over a single night in February 1862, when Abraham Lincoln visited the crypt of his recently deceased eleven-year-old son Willie, and it is narrated by the dead.
The Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist concept — the transitional state between death and rebirth. Saunders populates his with the dead of Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, each trapped by their inability to accept what has happened: they prefer to believe they are merely “sick” rather than dead, that they are in “sick boxes” rather than coffins, that the young dead must be helped back to the living world rather than guided toward what follows. Into this community comes Willie Lincoln, and the novel becomes a negotiation among the dead about what to do with a presidential child while above them Abraham Lincoln grieves.
The Form
The narrative is delivered through two channels: the voices of the dead (identified as theatrical dialogue) and fragments of historical documentation — period newspaper accounts, memoirs, diaries — that describe Lincoln on this night from various perspectives. The historical fragments are frequently contradictory: two witnesses cannot agree on the color of Lincoln’s eyes, the size of the gathering, or the expression on his face. Saunders is making a point about how history is constructed from partial, biased, unreliable accounts.
What It Earns
The formal dazzle can obscure the novel’s emotional center: a father unable to leave his dead child, and a community of dead who must help him go. The connection between Lincoln’s private grief and his nation’s grief — the Civil War was killing tens of thousands while Willie lay dying — gives the novel a scale that makes the grief feel historical as well as personal.
Our rating: 4.0/5 — A formally virtuosic debut novel from one of America’s finest short fiction writers, achieving genuine emotional power when its experimental architecture allows the grief at its center to breathe.
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