Lincoln was widely seen as being out of his depth, “a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Among Saunders’ most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that “the swiftest halt to the (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest.” This is a hard truth, insisting that brutality now might save lives later, and it gives this novel a bitter moral edge. 1862, after all, was the height of the Civil War, when the outcome was far from assured.

But the sneaky brilliance of the book is in the way Saunders uses these encounters-not so much to excavate an individual’s sense of loss as to connect it to a more national state of disarray. Saunders deftly interweaves historical accounts with his own fragmentary, multivoiced narration as young Willie is visited in the netherworld by his father, who somehow manages to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, at least temporarily. Rather, he is in a despair so deep it cannot be called mere mourning over his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president, sort of, although he is not yet dead. It's also a fitting master metaphor for Saunders’ first novel, which is about suspension: historical, personal, familial, and otherwise.

The bardo is a key concept of Tibetan Buddhism: a middle, or liminal, spiritual landscape where we are sent between physical lives. Short-story virtuoso Saunders' ( Tenth of December, 2013, etc.) first novel is an exhilarating change of pace.

Review lincoln in the bardo