Unfinished Lives

Lincoln in the Bardo a novel by George Saunders.  Random House.  343 pp.  *****

I haven’t been a fan of George Saunders’ short stories.  I read Tenth of December with admiration but without much pleasure.  The stories seemed clever and aesthetically interesting, but I couldn’t get into them as narratives.  I’m more a John O’Hara guy.  I’m interested in stories and people, but not so much in a new way of telling the story.  George Saunders is the most talented guy in the creative writing class.  But I left creative writing class after my freshman year.

Lincoln in the Bardo is something else altogether, Saunders first and so far only novel.  The title itself is intriguing, a weird mix of cultures; we picture Honest Abe alongside the Dalai Lama, or Chogyam Trungpa (maybe they could have a drink).  But I thought at first that this might just be Saunder’s cleverness taken to a whole new level, and I shied away from the book.

What changed my mind was a piece that my wife sent me, something Saunders wrote after the election.[1]  I was so struck by what he’d said—exactly what I wished I’d said, but hadn’t figured out—also the way he said it, that I wanted to give his writing a second try.  Someone had given me the novel when it came out.  It’s been sitting on my shelf ever since.

His cleverness suddenly seems to be brilliance.  The novel centers on a single event, the death of Lincoln’s beloved son Willie, and what happens around that, both in this world and—pardon the expression—in the afterlife.  The Tibetan term for that is Bardo, which means an intermediate state.  In my feeble understanding of the Tibetan world view (I haven’t read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but I’ve read a brilliant commentary on it[2]), a Bardo is an intermediate state between one life and another, the state we’re in before we’re reborn.  It’s also true that every state is a bardo state, because we’re always in transition from one life to the next.

Saunders alternates chapters, though not on a one-to-one basis, some concerning historical records from Lincoln’s day, what people said about him and his situation (the research must have been massive), the other an imaginative recreation of the spirits in the graveyard where Willie was buried, what their (after)life is like, and their concerns about him.  They don’t know, initially, that he’s the President’s son; they know nothing of what’s actually happening out in the world, and some of them have been in the graveyard for years.  But they are capable of inhabiting a living being, if one happens into the graveyard, also of inhabiting (I almost want to say cohabiting with) another spirit, and learning about them.  They use that capacity later in the book and learn a lot.  It is also, eventually, their undoing.

I’ve heard the book compared so Spoon River Anthology, in that it concerns spirits in a graveyard, but the books aren’t comparable in terms of quality.  Spoon River Anthology is an interesting historical artifact from a mediocre poet.  There’s more poetry in a chapter of Saunders than in that whole book.

My understanding of the bardo state is shaky, but from what I know, Saunders’ vision of it is not conventional.  The people he portrays are more like ghosts, or haints, spirits of people whose lives were unfinished and who can’t let go of them.  There’s a middle-aged man, for instance, who had married a much younger woman and never consummated the marriage, deciding that he couldn’t be attractive to her and that he would love her as a companion.  But that love blossomed into something else for her, and just when she was willing to receive him in bed, he died in an accident.  There’s another man who was sexually attracted to men at a time when people frowned on that, to say the least; when a man he loved left him, he slit his wrists, but then repented of that act hoping someone would save him.  No one did.

There’s a huge cast of characters, all of them interesting in their own way, and Saunders characterizes them expertly, letting them speak and interact and show us who they are.  They’re all unhappy and disgruntled.  And they are all, as we find out eventually, afraid to admit the actual truth of their situation.  That fear itself might be the problem.  In any case, they return to their coffins—which they call their sick boxes—during the day, and come out at night, just like all ghosts.  They behave as we would expect.

One of them, in fact, a former preacher, actually has a vision of heaven and hell, someone sitting in judgment of spirits who come to him and sending them one place or another.  Saunders, who is now a Tibetan Buddhist but was raised Catholic, renders that vision expertly.  Heaven looks beautiful beyond belief, hell terrifying, just the way my Catholic friends used to tell me.  But this preacher—who found he was headed to the bad place, though he didn’t understand why—also found, weirdly, that he could run away.  He could leave that place of judgment and go back to the graveyard.  It’s not exactly that spirits have free will.  They’re severely restricted.  But they have a kind of life, and seem to think they can accomplish something.

If they finally give up on that belief, they experience something which the survivors call a matterlightblooming phenomenon, a huge energy event, in which the spirit disappears.  Normally, when children show up, they undergo that phenomenon almost immediately.  They don’t have the unfinished business that adults have.  But Willie Lincoln hasn’t done that, and the other spirits seem to believe that something awful will happen if he stays; a kind of stasis will set in.  They’re trying to enable him to go.  The thing that helps is that his father keeps returning to the crypt where he is buried, not just sitting there, but opening the coffin.  That seems to be a historical fact.  Lincoln couldn’t quite believe his beloved son had died.

I don’t think it gives away too much to say that, after his third visit to the crypt, Lincoln fully accepts what happened.  That allows Willie to accept it; he inhabits his father and hears his thoughts.  And once he does, he has a sudden, almost joyful understanding: he understands his true state and pronounces the word that all the spirits around him are afraid to hear.  He then removes himself from the place with one of those energy bursts.  As one of the spirits says, he is suddenly nowhere, and everywhere.

Somehow Saunders has created a vision of the afterlife that encompasses both the Catholicism of his youth and the Buddhism of his adulthood, and perhaps goes beyond both.  The conclusion of the novel accepts both the heart-wrenching sorrow of life (which Lincoln, as President of a divided country, was in the midst of) and its almost impossible beauty, the two things inextricably intertwined.  Lincoln would never have wanted his son to die, but the implication is that, by accepting his death, Lincoln becomes a broken and more humble man, but thereby is better able to identify with all the people in his country, so he can be a better President.  I’m full of admiration for this novel, and for the vision it encompasses.  Maybe I’ve been wrong about George Saunders all along.

[1] https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/a-slightly-altered-course?r=2rnbl6&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

[2] Luminous Emptiness by Francis Fremantle