Getting a Read: Lincoln in the Bardo
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
It’s my firm belief that when a person recommends a book to me, they’re handing me an inside look at their soul. In this series, “Getting a Read,” I try to uncover truth about books and their recommenders.
THE RECOMMENDER
Marcus Belmore, songwriter, hypnotist, videographer, wordswriter, photographer, and proud owner of a fuzzy, toothless rescue cat with anime eyes who, I suspect, might actually run the world. Marcus and I met on a date and eventually became the kind of friends who connect over a shared love of wild stories and creative ventures. He recommended this book to me for the third time earlier this month and I figured it was the perfect way to close out Spooktober here on the blog.
HOW TO READ IT
On Halloween Night by candlelight, while stuffing one’s face with candy to stave off the sadness and creep factor of sitting with a fictional graveyard for a few hours. For real, go get it now so you can spend your evening waiting for trick-or-treaters in style.
REVIEW: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
It took about three minutes of knowing Marcus to understand there’s a high likelihood he’s read more than I have, which you probably can guess is quite a decent number of books. During a conversation sometime last year about what we should each read next, he first recommended Lincoln in the Bardo and followed the rec immediately by saying, “I learned so much from Saunders in his class. Still have the notes he wrote on my midterms.” My mouth fell open.
JEALOUS
I already knew I wanted to read this book, only just printed, by the time of Marcus’s admission that he had once had the literary ear of one of my very favorite artists of all time: George Saunders (another MacArthur Fellow! Check out my review of The Center Cannot Hold for more info about what that means if you missed it).
Before I tell you why you should read this book (and people who hate horror, don’t worry, I do too and this book is not horror), let me tell you why I love Saunders.
The New York Times Magazine calls George Saunders the “writer for our time” placing him alongside David Foster Wallace as one of the best minds of this literary age, with only a half-hearted apology for leaning so heavily on the trope. Whether or not he is indeed a writer for our time, he is certainly a writer for MY time, and entered my life at exactly the right moment.
His 2014 collection of short stories, Tenth of December, made the difference between my decision to remain a professional musician or chase my writerly dreams. A friend handed it to me just after I had ACL surgery. I was hungry to read anything that might reflect my mood at the time or expand my literary chops as I recovered. At that moment, I wasn’t looking to give up music, but I was aware of a burgeoning desire to create and return to the writing I’d left behind in my earlier years. With no real prior experience with short stories, this book was a blank space for me. I had no idea what I’d find.
I found a mirror. I found darkness. I found fantastic. I found joy. I found authenticity. Somebody, please, recommend Tenth of December to me and I’ll be happy to review it in depth.
Most of all, I rediscovered a dormant personal truth: I’m a word peddler, a thinker of thinks, and a dreamer of dreams. Though I loved music, it was language—further, it was words that were essential. I didn’t look back from the moment I read Tenth of December. Off I went to graduate school, and through it a whole world of language and letters opened up to me. Thank you, George Saunders.
Back to our book.
Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’ first true novel, but you may not recognize it as such. If this book’s cover and title don’t cue you to the fact that there’s something strange about this work of fiction, just open it up. You don’t even have to read the first two pages and meet the first of many ghosts to know something’s different.
I first opened this book at The Wild Detectives and found a wild-looking script-like text that I barely understood. Further investigation revealed a cast of characters, a bardo, a collection of sources, and totally unreliable notation conventions.
And here’s where I put the content warning, though this book is so good I regret warning anyone away from it: If literary sex, gore, and a fair bit of awful language bother you, maybe pass on this book.
If you want to be a blank slate when you read this book, and I’d say there’s merit in that venture, just take my recommendation on the basis of what I’ve already written and go buy or rent the audiobook now. This week, I spoke to a person who attempted to read this book and put it down due to confusion, so in light of that comment, I’m going to break a few things down in more detail for those of you who might want a roadmap.
The cast of characters is made up primarily of ghosts. These souls are a set of wild personalities. They’re not quite disembodied spirits who share a space in common: a graveyard where they all remain connected to their “sickboxes” (a mitigating word for coffin). They are located in the bardo: a Tibetan term for the existence between life and death. This in between place is not quite the afterlife and not quite living. Saunders draws on several faith traditions and mythologies to craft an excellent depiction of… well, I’ll let you discover that on your own.
This book takes place over a single night and is filled with sources that purport to tell the story of the evening Lincoln’s son, Willie, died. Saunders hooked me so well that I assumed these facts were real when I first read it—a trap I should’ve known better to fall for. Reader beware, this book is only loosely based in history, though plenty of solid research went into its construction. Saunders calls these fantastically-crafted sources “alt-facts”. I call them perfect.
A particularly beautiful bit of narrative destabilization came when five of these alt-sources described the moon as it looked the night of Willie Lincoln’s death, and none of them did so the same way. Believing as I did at the moment I encountered this bit of text, I thought to myself, “What a heartbreakingly accurate picture of the shifting landscape of memory.” And now, knowing better and feeling mildly foolish for wandering into my belief in the veracity of these alt-facts, I still think the same.
How can you really believe an account of anything if five witnesses give conflicting testimonies?
Blessedly, we remain in the world of fiction, not the oft-fictitious sounding real world, for a few moments longer. Long enough to say, at least, that Saunders accomplishes the gift of painting reality—of painting authenticity—with words time and again. The core truths of this book are things like death anxiety, the love of a father for his lost (or losing?) child, and ultimately, loss itself.
Maybe it’s just the mental moment I’m in or the projects currently on my plate, but this book gave me hope in its groundlessness and unreliability. It marked for me the ways in which art is universal in its mimicry of the essential bits of life. Particularly, it reminded me that when we take a good long look into the dark, when we sit comfortably or uncomfortably next to whatever sickboxes we’re denying are coffins long enough to understand them for what they are, we might find ourselves relieved of our burdens.
THE RECOMMENDER IN REVIEW
Marcus appreciates the darkness, and perhaps even more so, the dark humor in life, both of which this book contains in scads. As a great lover of horror, I’m not surprised that he would fall in love with a text like this, especially in it’s more theatrical form. Marcus embodies twilight and the in-between better than most people I know and also knows when to call it like it is. Whether it’s terrible music or terrible books, he can spot them and move on from them, hunting down the better, more authentic truths present in art across many forms. In this book, I see Marcus the Renaissance Man reflected. I’m grateful for his wildly creative presence in my life and look forward to reading many more of his recommendations in the future.
WHERE TO FIND IT
If you’ve got an unused audible credit or access to your local library’s e-rental system, that’s the way to read this book. With 166 voices ranging from Nick Offerman to George Saunders’ wife, this is one of the most extensive audiobooks ever produced. It’s a thing of beauty I’d rank right up there next to Jim Dale’s work on the Harry Potter audiobooks, though, an entirely different experience. Marcus recommended this method of consuming the book, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. On a second read, or the first if you’re not the type to circle back, consider reading the text along with the audiobook. There are many things in the printed text, including those crazy notation conventions I mentioned earlier, that deserve the reader’s attention. These things get lost in the audiobook format.
BONUS
Check out Saunders talking at length about why art and culture are essential to each other in this great interview transcript from LitHub.
