Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo
Tony Liu | Dec. 5, 2017“Weirdly intimate”, would be how I describe Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, his first attempt at a full-length novel. Weird, mostly because of the structure of the novel, a unique blend between play, collage, and, of course, novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is delivered through points of views of a group of deceased buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, manifesting somewhat magically in the bardo, which is a Tibetan concept of limbo between life and death. It centers around the voices of three characters: Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and the reverend Everly Thomas, each who has his reason for staying in the bardo. The events of the living, centering around the death of Willie Lincoln, the third son of President Abraham Lincoln, is told through a series of collages, some of which are excerpts from real documents, others are made up. To Saunders’s credit, his weird structure is not meant to confuse the readers: indeed, he spends a good chunk of the pages at the beginning to familiarize readers with his style so that they will not be confused when a barrage of new characters showing up later in the story. The unusual structure also raises many questions: why does Saunders give us the stream of consciousness of the dead but not the living? What does it mean that many times the perspectives of the dead are interchangeable? There are potentially many other questions that make the style interesting.