'Lincoln in the Bardo' sets president among the dead

The idea for George Saunders' first novel, "Lincoln in the Bardo," came to him in a flash.

"We were driving by this graveyard way back in the '90s," he recalled, "and a friend just said, 'You know Willie Lincoln was buried in that crypt right there? And his father was so grief-stricken that he went in to hold the body.' And my little writer's mind went, 'Oh my God! Someone's got to write about that!'"

Willie Lincoln was the president's son. He died at age 11, probably of typhoid, in the White House. It was Feb. 20, 1862, almost a year into the Civil War.

"I'm not a visual person, but my mind just lit up with that image of Lincoln holding his son's body across his knees, sort of like the Pieta meets the Lincoln Memorial."

But Saunders, who has enjoyed decades of acclaim for his short stories, held off writing the Lincoln novel. For years.

"Some kind of smart part of me just said, 'Don't. Don't try it now, just keep it in mind.' So for the next 20-odd years, whenever I felt artistically happy, that idea would sort of come out of the shadows and say, 'Hey, stupid! Are you ready yet?' and I'd go, 'No, not yet!'"

Finally, in 2012, he decided he would try. But he wanted to keep as close as he could to the purity of that image of grief. While the story is about a parent's agony at the loss of a child, Saunders thought telling that tale solely from Lincoln's perspective would dull that searing pain.

Saunders said that if he knows what he's writing about, he's in trouble. He tries to find other ways into a story, adding new elements to see what happens.

"If I can put in three or four interesting vectors, this story will tell me what it's about," he said, "as opposed to me telling it what it's about."

So he began adding other voices: historians, contemporary witnesses and newspaper accounts. All are short, most only a few lines. Then he began adding other-worldly voices, spirits in the graveyard who cannot pass into the beyond. The living can't see them, which is good because some have taken on bizarre forms linked to the unhappiness that keeps them there. There are rich and poor, young and old, slaves and masters, soldiers and pastors. Each has adored someone. But they have not come to terms with a harsh reality, Saunders said.

"If you are lucky, you don't find this out until the end of the game, but the truth is everything we love is conditional," he said. "And so we seem to be sort of made by a contradictory maker who says, 'I am going to design you to be absolute adoration machines, and oh, by the way, everything you love can be taken away from you in an instant.'"

The spirits all want to talk to Lincoln. But the grieving president sits in the quiet crypt unaware he is in the midst of a maelstrom of seething emotion.

"Lincoln in the Bardo" is a remarkable, exhilarating read. There are 166 different voices in the story. Saunders will read from the book at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis tomorrow night at 7.

A lot has been made of this being his first actual novel after publishing so many short-story collections. He said he doesn't know what comes next for him as a writer.

"I'm kind of going back to my 30-year mantra, which is just, 'Every story knows its own length,'" he said. "It's funny, you can get into something and even after just a few paragraphs you are getting signals from its DNA that it wants to be this long, or that long."

And then, Saunders said, he follows his internal desire to always make his stories shorter. So it may be a while till his next novel.