Take it to the Bardo, Bridget

Lincoln in the Bardo, the first novel by noted short-story writer George Saunders, is set in a graveyard. It is at the time of the Civil War. Night, the first night of internment for little Willie Lincoln, the departed son of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Willie was the most wonderful of children, and Great Emancipator Lincoln, completely disconsolate, goes to the graveyard to embrace his son's lifeless form, stacked in a crypt, ahead of an eventual journey to Illinois. Told in episodic bursts, the story reads like a play. That is due to its construction, which has various, graveyard characters delivering a stream of seeming recitations, or statements, many of which do not make immediate sense. Willie, like many of the other souls in the old graveyard, is in a twilight world between death and life - in, as Tibetan Buddhists might have it, a Bardo. We find him there persevering, observing, lamenting. The mood of melancholy is very deep. But broken from time to time by the humorous rim shot, albeit from an old snare from a not-too-far-off battlefield. Saunders' is a mix of low- and high-brow. 'Bardo' is in turns like a Romance novella, a Zombie comedy (or Marvel comic), a Buster Keaton movie but faintly macabre, an rejected outtake from Poe's Ulame era notebooks. It sets one to thinking of Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (unto death), Wiscons Death Trip, Jose Feliciano singing the National Anthem. Characters come and go in Lincoln in the Bardo, as if in an Elliot play. Or, Our Town. But, a little funnier. The book holds interest, mostly because of its commanding mood. It has some --not a lot -- of the flair we find at times with Thomas Pynchon, who, on the dust jacket appears, heralding Sanders as "an astoundingly tuned voice -- graceful, dark authentic and funny." That seems like strong praise, although it may be for another book. Warning : If a you or a loved one are nearing the old cemetery ridge, beyond the vale, gonesville, I can't think it would be a bag of fun to cuddle up with Lincoln in the Bardo. But there is no telling what may fasten one's attention, especially at this moment in history. Bits of it are a bit like Doctorow's best in a way. Something like a French Symbolist prose poem too. While the episodic structure helps, it was finally a slow page turner and something of a dread fest for me. You might like it - but you should be ready for some sleeplessness, some graveyard walking, and some head scratching, I'd adjudge. Keep an ear out for audio version. Elmo is Willie and Alvin Dark plays Lincoln. -Jack Vaughan