“Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the Man Booker Prize

[David Lockmiller]

George Saunders’s surreal, experimental first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday, October 17, 2017.

The novel unfolds in a cemetery in 1862, where a grieving Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt that holds the body of his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever. At the graveyard, Willie’s spirit is joined by a garrulous, motley community of ghosts who exist in the liminal state between life and death. At times, the narrative feels more like a play or an oral history than a novel, with dialogue among the ghosts, interspersed with scraps of historical research and snippets of contemporary news accounts that Mr. Saunders gathered, or in some cases invented.

This is quite a contrast with Elizabeth Keckley's vivid description of the moments when President Lincoln, the father, viewed his son's body and expressed his loss in words and actions.

I assisted in washing and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed when Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief. He came to the bed, and lifting the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring:

"My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is better off in Heaven, but then we loved him so. It was hard--hard--to have him die!"

Great sobs choked his utterance. He bowed his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.

I do not think that I will bother reading any part of "Lincoln in the Bardo."