Fancy, award-winning books can be very hit-or-miss. Sometimes they win the award for the wrong thing, like because the story is timely or the storytelling is stylized. Sometimes a book wins an award because another one didn’t, and somebody thought this one would make up for it. I tend to choose books from either side of the award-winning book if I don’t know the author, just in case. I hate being diappointed.
But I’d already read George Saunders’ A Swim In a Pond In the Rain, so Lincoln In the Bardo‘s Booker Prize didn’t influence me at all. The rainy, pond-swimming book showed how well Russian storytellers storytell. It was like a seminar in a book. I read a bunch of good Russian stories that I never would have got around to reading in my entire life. And I understood them better than I had any right to, because the whole point of the book is to explain every drop of those stories.
The Lincoln book is a little different, though. It’s got fiction and non-fiction like the other, but it’s all part of the storytelling. And it’s got some really stylized storytelling. It’s narrated by hundreds of people, both in reality and imagined. Snippets of quotes or thoughts. It tells the story of President Lincoln’s son dying, and Lincoln travelling to the graveyard one night to say his last goodbyes. What Abe doesn’t know is that all the ghosts in the cemetery are tyring to get him to help his kid accept his own death, so he won’t end up earthbound ghost like them, only even worse off because he’s a dead kid and they don’t tend to fare well.
Folks who haven’t lost a child themselves can only imagine what it’s like. Saunders does a good job imagining. Once you grab the crest of the wave of the story, it’s a great ride. I felt not just sorrow, but outrage, sublime fear, pity, and more.
Just to make sure that I’d understood what I’d read, I bought a study guide to this book. Maybe I bought the wrong study guide. They didn’t point out anything interesting that I hadn’t noticed all by myself. And they really beat dead ponies on a few points. So, even though it’s a little weird, it’s an approachable novel. You don’t actually have to keep up with who is narrating. Not usually. You already have a pretty guide idea any time it’s important.
There’s bound to be a movie. I bet Eddie Murphy is going to be in it.
