George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House), which was published on Valentine's Day less than a week before Presidents' Day, falls like manna from heaven on those in need of a President to love. If, like me, you've discovered that reruns of The West Wing don't have the juju they once did, this new, ingeniously conceived, deeply entertaining yet emotionally compelling novel may be the salve your soul craves.
The first novel by a longtime master of genre-testing, form-bursting short fiction, Lincoln in the Bardo imagines the early-term Abraham Lincoln struggling with the outbreak of the Civil War while mourning the sudden death of his 11-year-old son Willie. In earthly time, it's a small slice of life, but Saunders populates his tale with scores of individuals �" some historical, others the products of his fecund imagination, some living, some dead, many in-between �" who tell the story with such prismatic richness that you're lifted out of ordinary time into the fullness of soul time.
A half-dozen of these characters are pivotal to the story, and the second one we hear from, on the third page, is Roger Bevins III, an ordinary gay man in 19th-century America, which makes him anything but ordinary. But what's most extraordinary is that he takes his place in the cast of principals with no more special treatment than the rest. The impact of his inclusion, by a straight-identified author, is enormous. All the infinite ways there are to be gay mix meaningfully with roger bevins iii. (Historical sources and their authors are capitalized in standard academic style; tellingly, the fictional characters, including the great President and his son, are identified in lower case.)
Nothing about the prose is ordinary. It looks and reads something like a play script, though the speeches are upside-down. They're mostly short paragraphs, at their most expansive no longer than a couple pages, but the speaker, or source, is identified in small type beneath. Some texts are excerpts from historical sources (some of which the author has altered to fit his narrative scheme), but most are dialogue: Saunders' characters interacting imaginatively, feverishly, with one another. This is not intimidating hyper-text the reader has to sweat. Within a few pages you're in the swing of it, and the pithiness of the entries compels you along. Saunders has done the work; you get the transformative drama.
The bardo is the Tibetan Buddhist name for the "place" or spiritual state of a human between physical death and whatever comes next. So Lincoln, whose assassination is only adumbrated in the later pages, is not the one in the bardo but rather, the living man who goes into the bardo, here a Georgetown cemetery where the recently deceased Willie (who is in the bardo ) is interred (until, historically, his body is exhumed to be buried with his father in Springfield, IL). The plot revolves around who gets out of the bardo (roughly signifying the acceptance of death and the willingness to move on, the putative goal) and who doesn't. I'm not telling.
The depiction of Lincoln, in itself no naive Valentine, is of a man devastated by grief suddenly called to experience the deaths of the legions of other boys in the bloody war only beginning to become a death mill �" the sons, brothers, lovers and comrades of his fellow Americans. His desire to remain with Willie, and Willie with him, is the fulcrum of the story, emotionally grounding its otherwise wild excursions into the varieties of human experience.
Minor characters include a 19th-century American panoply: slaves and their masters in perpetual struggle, freemen and outlaws, people of the cloth, people of the trough (including a pedophile, the Vermonter, who's not a gay character), people with voices so keen your mind reels with their cacophony. Lincoln's visits to their bardo snap them all back to life, and into actions ranging from the expected quarrels to the sometimes forced inhabiting of each other's "body-forms." There are no ordinary evenings in Georgetown.
For reasons beyond carnality but not without admiration, roger bevins iii is best buddies with hans vollman, a printer whose most notable asset, then and now, is an enormous penis, which makes numerous appearances in various degrees of tumescence, all of them comical precisely in the way the most serious matters this book pursues are presented in comic terms. It's this comedic distance that permits Saunders extravagances of intimacy among and with his characters, none of whom you will want to escape from your personal bardo.
Gay readers will get Roger. A refugee from a marriage "in the previous place" that yielded children, Roger's version of fate entails falling for a man named Gilbert, getting his heart broken by him, and in the bardo, seeing the sweetness of it all. His big-dicked friend hans vollman confides in us one of Roger-in-the-bardo's fantasies ("future-forms"): "[on a voyage] he had been fucked and fucked well by a Brazilian engineer, who had taught him much and given him much pleasure (and now mr. bevins knew that that life was for him, whether it be good or not in God's eyes)."
This utterly remarkable novel is good in God's eyes.