“Lincoln in the Bardo” is an extended national ghost story, an erratically funny and piteous séance of grief. The spirit of the story arises from a tragic footnote in American history when President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever during the Civil War. Everything about Saunders’s first novel, which won the Man Booker Prize, confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like. It’s composed entirely of brief quotations — some real, some imagined — from people who worked for the president, his friends, colleagues, enemies, biographers and, most strikingly, ghosts trapped in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, where Willie was laid to rest. Despite that bizarre chorus, the heart of the story remains Lincoln, the shattered father who rides alone to the graveyard at night. As the spirits pass through the president’s body like light through a glass, they catch his thoughts and fears. We can hear Lincoln wrestling with his faith, struggling to maintain his composure against an avalanche of grief and a torrent of criticism from a nation devastated by war.
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