Occasionally, a chapter from what is called “the previous place” intrudes: eye-witness accounts, diaries, letters, newspaper reports, also frequently contradictory.īut this story belongs to the dead, even if they don’t think they are. Those voices, and Willie’s, come to us in snatches, usually brief, little bursts of subjectivity and consciousness tumbling over one another, sometimes conversing, sometimes interrupting, squabbling, contradicting. Out of this familial catastrophe – albeit one that was available for the scrutiny of a divided and loss-struck nation – Saunders conjures a breathtakingly agile narrative, a polyphony (and occasional cacophony) of the voices of the dead that surround Willie, and attempt to ease his passage through his final bardo, the transitional state between life and death defined by Tibetan Buddhism.

His father, already beset by internal doubt and external uproar a year into the American civil war, was propelled by restless grief to walk the dark and stormy Georgetown cemetery where Willie’s body lay. Unable even to attend his burial, his mother retreated to her bed, where she remained under sedation for a prolonged period. It is the story of Willie Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln, who died, probably of typhoid fever, in February 1862. Now comes his first novel, which, at first sight, appears to have little of the satirically comic about it. He stopped doing that, acknowledged the influences of Monty Python and Steve Martin, and wrote six story collections of inspired, hyper-real mayhem, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and Tenth of December. The answer came to him: he had left the fun out of his work.

A week later, he heard Paula laughing “with real sincerity” over some poems and doodles that he had made to amuse himself during conference calls at work.

Lincoln in the bardo book review