From that germ, Saunders weaves a visionary tale told by a babel of dead voices from the city’s past, as nightmarish and darkly comic as Saunders’s finest short fiction. In the days that followed, the newspapers of the time reported that the grieving President would leave the White House under cover of night to visit the crypt after hours,where he held his son’s body. In February of 1862, one year into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever and was interred in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington D.C., some two miles from the White House. The story takes as its starting point an historical footnote. But however many volumes devoted to Lincoln may be released or rereleased in the coming months, I can say with absolute certainty none of them will beareven the remotest resemblance to the new novel from George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo. Given that the union of the states is now as perilously close to fragmenting as it has been since the Civil War, one may further suppose it likely that Abraham Lincoln’s term will see a marked uptick in interest. One hardly need have one’s finger on the pulse of the publishing industry to guess that the office of the American presidency will be a popular topic among the books to come out in 2017.
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