The poems in “Spoon River” were narrated from beyond the grave by the dozens of souls “sleeping on the hill” in the local cemetery. PhotoThe similarities between “Spoon River” and Saunders’s new novel extend well beyond the Lincoln association and the graveyard confessions. Saunders’s short stories — “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation” and “Tenth of December” — tend to vacillate between two impulses: satire and black comedy, reminiscent of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut; and a more empathetic mode, closer to Anderson and William Trevor. Though there are moments of dark humor in some of the ghost stories here, “Bardo” definitely falls into the more introspective part of that spectrum. Saunders’s novel is at its most potent and compelling when it is focused on Lincoln: a grave, deeply compassionate figure, burdened by both personal grief and the weight of the war, and captured here in the full depth of his humanity.

Source: New York Times February 06, 2017 22:20 UTC