George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.
This week marks the publication of Lincoln in the Bardo, the long-awaited first novel by the acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders. Before I’d read the book, I planned to ask Saunders about the obvious thing: After years of writing only stories (and the occasional novella), why take on longform, and what was difficult about it? But then I started to read—and short versus long stopped seeming like the most meaningful distinction. Lincoln, regardless of its length, is not like anything Saunders has ever written before. It’s not like anything anyone has written before. The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work he completed is a genre unto itself.
The book reads like a play for voices, with no narrator or stage directions, mixing 19th-century dialogue with descriptive passages cribbed from Abraham Lincoln’s real-life biographers. Since there’s no explanatory voiceover, it takes a few pages to absorb the audacious premise: It’s set in a Civil War-era limbo/purgatory, a twilight world where dead souls linger and converse. These, we learn, are the inhabitants of Oak Hill cemetery in Georgetown, who all cling to the same obvious lie: They are “very sick,” they insist. (Not dead. Never that.) So it is all very perplexing when a tall, angular man in a top hat appears among them, distraught and crying out for his lost son—12-year-old Willie Lincoln, who fell ill and died in 1862. Ultimately, the book explores the
