Lincoln in the Bardo (4*)

What a prodigious feat of historical research and literary imagination!  Alas, it's not my cup of tea as I generally read for plot or character identification, although I was delighted to encounter Roger Bevins III, the very central gay "shade" conjured by George Saunders. ("Shades" manifest as grotesque exaggerations of a person's negative characteristics and Roger, depicted as an explosion of eyeballs, may be a very sly and apt metaphor for cruising).

It took me several chapters to suss out the structure of the novel's narration which alternates between the voices of characters in the "bardo" (people in between death and rebirth in the Buddhist tradition) and excerpts from historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, the latter often in bald contradiction. Saunders's unique novel is also grounded in the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell, which he vividly depicts behind "diamond gates." But there's also the notion that the most ordinary moments, which he catalogs extensively, comprise our lives:

Geese above, clover below, the sound of one's own breath when winded.

The moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one's beloved's name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger.

Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead.

Death ultimately is defined by their loss, which is why the "shades" want to hang on as long as they can.

None of it was real; nothing was real.

Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.

These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.

And now must lose them.  

Like the shades themselves, Saunders prose is nearly evanescent.  When they (and little Willie Lincoln, whose death prompts Abe's visit to the cemetery where he is interred) let go of life he calls it matterlightblooming.

Try that on Instagram.