A president walks into a Buddhist purgatory

Who would have predicted that the biggest literary splash in recent memory—a novel judged sophisticated and funny by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Stephen Colbert—would be a book about the afterlife? Or that George Saunders would not merely evoke a playful, symbolic afterlife contrived to comment on our days together on this planet, but a real inquiry into eternal suffering? Saunders, who was raised Catholic and has studied Buddhism for more than 25 years, wonders in his novel whether our existences aren’t in fact, for better or worse, eternal.

Saunders’s title announces a very strange plot: this is a story about Abraham Lincoln visiting a bardo, or Tibetan Buddhist purgatory. But Lincoln does not visit as a spirit. He is a living, grieving father visiting the Georgetown crypt of his son Willie, who has recently died of typhoid fever. Lincoln has no idea that he and his son are in a bardo and that surrounding him in the Oak Hill Cemetery are dozens of gregarious, disembodied souls.

Readers might expect some help with the term bardo, maybe an epigraph offering a definition. But Saunders leaves us to our own devices. So we do some reading and discover that Buddhist scholars have debated for centuries over an “inter­mediate state” existing between death and, as Saunders put it on a recent Late Night Show, “whatever’s next, maybe it’s reincarnation.” The tale is about what is next for Willie and for his father.