Lincoln in the Bardo

by | Jul 31, 2018 | Author's Blog

I’ve read 29 books so far this year, and just finished George Saunders’ Man Booker Prize Winner Lincoln in the Bardo. My personal view is that Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t so much a novel as a play in novel-like form. I expect to see it on Broadway in two or three years. It’s really a very short book. George Saunders is a short-story writer, and though this book is 368 pages, it could be formatted to half the number of pages. Imaginative, idiosyncratic, and bold in conception, it incorporates dozens of contemporary historical accounts to build a collage of Lincoln and his middle son Willie. The larger story is narrated by over a hundred inhabitants of the bardo (a sort of purgatory between life and rebirth), each with his or her own concerns and foibles. Saunders’ bardo is suitably creepy. I have only a few reservations. There seemed no purpose to the lack of punctuation, or to the purposeful misspelling of certain words. Also, two foul-mouthed characters seem out-of-character for the time period, while at the same time their foul dialogue is presented with decorously Victorian redaction, as in “The f___ing little s_____! I should kick his G_____n, f___ing nuts!” Despite these reservations, Lincoln in the Bardo is a brave, artistic work, a wild cross-breeding of Waiting for Godot with Our Town, at once full of angst, darkly humorous, and poignant.