Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders

The time is 1862.  The United States is one year into the massive Civil War that tears its fabric apart, pitting families against each other and bringing death and destruction to so many.  The President is Abraham Lincoln and he questions whether what he has started was the right step and where his decisions will lead the nation.  In the midst of this, his beloved son Willie, sickens and dies.

Lincoln In The Bardo is George Saunder's imaginative retelling of the time right after Willie's death, when Abraham Lincoln is caught up in grief that will not let him surrender his son to the inevitable separation that death brings.  The Bardo is the limbo between death and the final destination of the soul, whether hell or heaven.  Lincoln visits his son's body at the cemetery where he has been taken and wonders how he will ever manage to let his son go.  The inhabitants of the cemetery, souls who have not yet left the Earth for their final trip, are caught up in the grief of the parent and the task of convincing him of the inevitability of death and the necessity of acknowledging it and moving beyond to acceptance.

There is a large cast of characters with all the souls waiting there.  Three men stand out as the main ones, a man whose inability to reconcile himself to the life that being gay would entail, a man who was not able to make his marriage work and a reverend who fears that he will never make it to heaven despite leading what he thought was a moral life.  There are many others who flit in and out of the story, a set of African-American souls who are working off the lifelong sorrows of slavery, those who spent their lives in poverty and acrimony, those who were snatched from life before they really lived it as they expected.  All are disappointed at their deaths and all must reconcile their earthly longings before they can move one.  In the meantime, Saunders also gives a feel for what the historical context of this moment in our nation's history was like.

Lincoln In The Bardo comes highly recommended.  It won the Booker Prize in 2017 and the Audie Award in 2018.  It is a highly imaginative and creative effort that stands out as a new form of literature.  It is also very divisive.  I read this with my book club and people either loved it or hated it.  I was on the side that loved it as it caught the reader up and transported one to a place where every decision is a weighty one that has decisive consequences.  I was shocked at the historical snippets that showed the vituperation that Lincoln underwent in the press and historical writings of the time.  We revere him as one of our greatest individuals but he was not loved in his own time; rather he was hated and mocked and his every decision questioned.  It gives a new way to process the divisive times of political turmoil our country is in at the present.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.