Saddest person in the world and why

Lincoln in the Bardo
By George Saunders
Random House
368 pp; $37

As the world debates U.S. President Donald Trump’s fitness to govern, celebrated American author George Saunders is travelling back 155 years to the Civil War to drop in on another president in crisis, Abraham Lincoln.

Saunders is best known for his four much-admired books of short stories, including Tenth of December, winner of the 2014 Folio Prize, but this week he launches his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Though it features a historical figure in the 16th President of the United States, don’t expect a conventional historical novel. After all, Saunders once wrote a short story starring a bag of Doritos.

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The ingenious new book is set on the night Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son Willie is laid to rest in a crypt near the White House. The boy has succumbed to typhoid fever, but instead of passing on to heaven, his spirit lingers. (The “bardo” in the title is a Tibetan term for the intermediate state between life and death.) He eagerly awaits visits from his father, who returns several times to the graveyard to cradle the boy’s body in his arms.

Written almost entirely in dialogue, Lincoln in the Bardo reads much like a play. It features a large cast of ghosts who refuse to admit they’re dead, and the lead ghost, a deceased printer named Hans Vollman, is perpetually naked with a boner. Think Beetlejuice but with a screenplay by Samuel Beckett.

The novel deftly blends almost slapstick comedy with the heartbreaking tragedy of a father mourning the loss of his son. “The comic was a way of leavening the possibly dull historicity,” Saunders says when reached by email, “the sense that can get into a book with historical roots that the book’s purpose is just to be an account.” Life, he insists, is a mix of comedy and tragedy, which “work together in the good cop/bad cop mode, one enabling, enriching and allowing the other.”

Certain chapters of the novel consist solely of quotations from a wide range of nonfiction books on Lincoln and his legacy. These chapters, understandably more sedate than the outlandish graveyard scenes, often contrast differing opinions and memories of the events surrounding Willie’s death and Lincoln’s reaction to it.

Today, Abraham Lincoln is often deemed the greatest American president in history – and has been for much of the last century or more – but in researching the man, Saunders was surprised to discover that many people at the time loathed him.

“There’s a wonderful book called The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President, which lists just about every negative thing anyone ever said publicly about Lincoln,” he describes. “It’s amazing and a reminder of the incredible revising that history is always doing.”

Saunders points out that Lincoln’s assassination itself helped turn the man into a hero. “It quickly recast everything he’d done in a saintly light and made critics reverse themselves dramatically.”

The country over which Lincoln presided was violently divided, and the Civil War killed more Americans than the First and Second World Wars combined. In Saunders’s novel, Lincoln concludes that “the swiftest halt to the thing (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest” and that he “must end suffering by causing more suffering.”

As Lincoln grieved for his own son, he had to reconcile his support for the war with the fact that it was killing the sons of tens of thousands of Americans. Lincoln’s grief, Saunders says, brought the man to “a better understanding of our common sorrow and an associated arising compassion.”

To get into the president’s head, Saunders wrote and revised obsessively, and let the interplay of creativity and research lead him in. “When I was writing Lincoln,” he says, “it was sort of a combinatorial thing – part me, part him. I was projecting my ideas onto his evolving reality, while trying to mimic ‘him’ (his voice, his way of thinking).”

In writing all his characters, Saunders says, “My main approach is to try to love them by finding some corollary of them in myself, and then to set about ‘proving’ my love by telling their stories with as much detail and truthfulness as I can.”

Saunders drew on this compassionate technique to bring to life his amazing troupe of ghosts, which includes the spirits of black slaves, whose bodies are buried in an unmarked common pit and who face racism even in this limbo state.

One of them, Thomas Haden, is a former slave whose white master was far from an ogre, but far from just. “I tried to imagine that scenario – a slave with the best master possible – and demonstrate that, even under those conditions, slavery was an evil and degrading institution,” Saunders says.

In a scene where Haden inhabits the president’s body, the ghost comes to understand Lincoln and feel compassion for him. “All of us, white and black, had made him sadder, with our sadness,” Haden remarks. A line from one of the historical works quoted in the book also describes Lincoln as “the saddest man in the world.”

The man’s sorrow is rooted in what the novel calls the “temporariness” of life and love. “Of course, it’s nearly impossible to keep these two thoughts in mind at once: I love you, and you (and I) are temporary,” Saunders says. “It’s why people get driven insane by grief. The trick is to try to begin to accept the truth that we’re all conditional and yet live in as happy and positive a way as we can. Whether we like it or not (we don’t), that’s the truth of the world. So can we find a way to manage our minds and hearts so as not to wilt in the face of that truth?”

The novel also observes that, in the long run, a person’s life work may prove inconsequential. One of the ghosts, the former owner of a pickle factory, says, “Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labours utterly forgotten?”

This scenario seems like the nightmare of certain writers, and Saunders admits that it’s also his. “Oh, for sure it is. And not only that, I think it’s a certainty that all our work will come to nothing. I had a close call on an airplane one time and, during it, had zero thought of ‘my accomplishments.'”

Still, he says he’s a better person when he struggles with an artistic problem. “It’s maybe analogous to working out,” he jokes. “There’s no question that, in the end, the thing rotting in the ground will show very little evidence of all that bench-pressing.”

Though our time in this world may well be brief, how fortunate that it coincides with the publication of Saunders’s glorious, groundbreaking fiction.

Neil Smith is the author of Boo and the short story collection Bang Crunch.