Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders' first full-length novel, and became a New York Times bestseller the week of March 5, 2017.^[1] Saunders is better known for his short stories, reporting, and occasional essays.^[2][3][4]

The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln's son William Wallace Lincoln and deals with the president's grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel is set in the bardo, an intermediate space between life and rebirth, and takes place over the course of a single evening.

Conception and research

Background

The novel was inspired by a story Saunders's wife's cousin told him about how Lincoln visited his son Willie's crypt on several occasions to hold the body,^[5] a story that seems to be verified by contemporary newspaper accounts.^[6] In March 2017, Saunders provided more details on the background and conception of his novel:

Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife’s cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt “on several occasions” to hold the boy’s body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read “Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”, decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt [...].^[7]

Saunders first announced his novel in a 2015 New York Times interview with author and novelist Jennifer Egan, revealing that it would have a “supernatural element” while remaining “ostensibly historical".^[8] The novel's title was announced in an April 2016 conversation between Saunders and Susan Sarandon in Interview Magazine.^[9] Later the same month, a summary of the book was released on the Random House website.^[10]

Development

Saunders did not originally intend to write a novel, and had avoided doing so in the past.^[11][7][12] But the story of Lincoln cradling his son's body stayed with him, and he eventually decided to write about it.^[5] The novel began as a single section, and was fleshed out over time.^[5]

To produce the book, Saunders conducted extensive research about Lincoln and the Civil War, reading books including Edmund Wilson's 1962 Patriotic Gore.^[13] He rearranged historical sources to get at the "necessary historical facts" and included excerpts from them in the novel.^[12] Many of these sources are cited in the book, along with some fictional ones.^[14]

Saunders has said that he "was scared to write this book." He worried about his ability to portray Lincoln, but decided that limiting his characterization to a single night made the writing process "not easy, but easier, because I knew just where he was in his trajectory as president."^[15] Given that his work is generally set in the present, Saunders compared writing a novel set in 1862 to "running with leg weights" because he "couldn’t necessarily do the voices that [he] would naturally create".^[16]

Setting

Much of the novel takes place in the bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist "intermediate state" between death and reincarnation when the soul is not connected to a body. In Saunders's conception, the "ghosts" that inhabit the bardo are "disfigured by desires they failed to act upon while alive" and are threatened by permanent entrapment in the liminal space.^[17] They are unaware that they have died, referring to the space as their “hospital-yard" and to their coffins as "sick-boxes".^[17]

Saunders has said that, while he named the setting after Tibetan tradition, he incorporated elements of the Christian and Egyptian afterlives, so as not to be "too literal." The selection of the term "bardo", he said, was "partly to help the reader not to bring too many preconceptions to it... in a book about the afterlife, it's good to destabilize all of the existing beliefs as much as you can."^[15]

Adaptations

Saunders has typically recorded his stories' audiobook adaptations by himself.^[18] But given the novel's cast of 166 characters, he did not feel he could be the sole voice actor in the audiobook. His friend Nick Offerman agreed early in the production process to take a role, and Offerman's wife, Megan Mullally, also agreed to participate. Offerman and Mullally then recruited Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rainn Wilson, and Susan Sarandon. Non-celebrities with parts include Saunders's wife, children, and various friends.^[18]

Mullally and Offerman purchased the rights to produce a film version of the novel five weeks after it was released.^[19] Saunders will be involved in the process, and has said "...[his] hope is that we can find a way to make the experience of getting this movie made as wild and enjoyable and unpredictable as the experience of writing it...".^[19]

Reception

Critical reception

The novel has been compared to Edgar Lee Masters's poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915. Some critics made the comparison favorably,^[20][17][21] and others did not.^[3]

Sales

The novel was a bestseller, included on both The New York Times Best Seller list^[22] and USA Today's list of bestselling novels.^[23]

References