So for one night in 1862, Saunders uses his ghosts and his historians to build a tapestry of grief. Willie Lincoln's body goes into its box and the box goes into its hole in the wall. There is a funeral (glossed over) and an interment in a borrowed crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. Knowing what comes, what history has already told us will happen ( must happen), it is the first of a hundred or a thousand small heartbreaks in George Saunders' long-awaited first novel, Lincoln In The Bardo.Īnd then Willie dies. His mother saved him candies from the elaborate dessert display - a chocolate fish plucked from a pond of spun sugar, a bee made from honey - and told him she would keep them until he was feeling better. It was thought, in that moment, on that night, that the boy would recover. He lay sick upstairs while below, the party went on until dawn. It is a state dinner at the White House, hosted by Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln - a lavish, decadent state dinner thrown in 1862, as the meat grinder of the Civil War is just beginning to churn.Īnd it's no simple death, because it is the death of the Lincolns' beloved young son Willie, of typhoid fever, at age 11. And with a death.īut this is no simple party. It begins, like so many simpler books before it, with a party. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Lincoln in the Bardo Author George Saunders

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