In this column I’ll share with you some of the books I’ve loved, and tell you why they’ve thrilled me. My hope is that you’ll be inspired to visit the bookstore or library, and that you will love them, too. They will mostly be novels, exceptions made for such splendid nonfiction books as “H Is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald or Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family.” They’ll mostly be classics, as opposed to newly published: books by Nabokov, Hillary Mantel, Iris Murdoch, Truman Capote, or more current authors like Geraldine Brooks, William Boyd, George Saunders.
I’ll start with Saunders, mostly known for his quirky short stories. I’m more attracted to longer fiction, so I was happy when “Lincoln in the Bardo” was published in 2017. It won the Booker Prize that year. It seems a good way to introduce this column ahead of Halloween because most of the characters in it are ghosts.
“Lincoln in the Bardo” is historical fiction laced through with magical realism. It’s about love and grief and regret, about resentment and judgment. It is beautifully sad, and though you may think its themes are bleak, the book is full of marvels. Critics called it “experimental,” and really, I’ve never read anything like it. Its construction is a patchwork: the sentences or paragraphs that comprise the narrative are all followed by bibliographic citations (most, but not all of these invented). Here’s an example of commentary on a long-planned presidential state dinner:
Abolitionists criticized the merry-making at the White House and many declined to attend. Ben Wade’s regrets were said to have been harshly worded: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”
In “Reveille in Washington, 1860- 1865,” by Margaret Leech.
Similarly, dialogue is attributed to the characters it belongs to. This may sound crazy-making, but I found that after the first few pages, the attributions don’t interrupt the reading at all. The patchwork becomes a smooth, colorful quilt.
There are multitudes of characters. Most are the occupants of the cemetery where the Lincolns’ young son, Willie, is recently interred. In other words, most of the characters are ghosts. And into Willie’s crypt comes his devastated father to visit him (this is historically true), unaware of the hushed population bearing witness.
Lincoln’s suffering and the shadow of the Civil War, less than a year old, permeate the plot. And we learn much about the history and grievances of many of the ghosts, who provide a chorus of lamentation. Here is young Roger Bevins III’s story:
Early in my youth I found I had a certain predilection which, to me, felt quite natural and even wonderful, but to others—my father, mother, brothers, friends, teachers, clergy, grandparents—my predilection did not seem natural or wonderful at all, but perverse and shameful, and hence I suffered: must I deny my predilection, and marry, and doom myself to a certain, shall we say, dearth of fulfillment? I wished to be happy (as I believe all wish to be happy), and so undertook an innocent—well, a rather innocent—friendship with a fellow in my school. But we soon saw that there was no hope for us, and so (to race past a few details, and stops-and-starts, and fresh beginnings, and heartfelt resolutions, and betrayals of those resolutions, there in one corner of the, ah, carriage house, and so on), one afternoon, a day or so after a particularly frank talk, in which Gilbert stated his intention to henceforth “live correctly,” I took a butcher knife to my room and, after writing a note to my parents (I am sorry, was the gist), and another to him (I have loved, and therefore depart fulfilled), I slit my wrists rather savagely over a porcelain tub.
roger bevins iii
Many of the reviews I’ve seen of this book mention the author’s humor and how slyly funny this book is. The bardo is filled with amusements that made me laugh out loud. There is also horror, and strangeness.
Tibetan Buddhism calls the transition period between death and rebirth the bardo. It is here that Willie waits for transformation, that the ghosts bide their time, that Lincoln weeps for what is lost and what is to come. The writing is sublime. For this reader, it was thrilling to spend time in Saunders’s world of spirit and reality, history and fantasy. Maybe it will be that way for you.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.