George Saunders is one of the most acclaimed short story writers in the world. The author of landmark collections like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and Tenth of December, Saunders has won the Folio Prize, the O Henry Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Macarthur “genius grant” and several other prizes over the last two decades. And now, he has finally written a novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is a curious blend of history, morality play and just a hint of science fiction. The narrative takes place in a Georgetown cemetery, over the course of a single night in February 1862, as President Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his recently departed son Willie. The grieving father is not alone, however: an ensemble cast of graveyard residents watches him. These poor souls, led by an inimitable pair called Bevins and Vollman, are stuck in the bardo (a Tibetan concept denoting a state between life and death) indefinitely. Their dazzling voices are the throbbing heart of this story, as they try to prevent young Willie from joining the ranks of the damned. Lincoln in the Bardo will be available in India starting February 14. Ahead of the novel’s release, BLink spoke to Saunders: the following are edited excerpts from the email conversation.

What was the starting point for the character of Reverend Thomas? In the bardo, he is the one character who has clarity over his situation: he accepts he is dead, he accepts the nature of the bardo — but chooses to linger anyway.

This might be an embarrassingly banal answer but I think he first got into the book because I was craving a third speaker, to add to the two main characters, Vollman and Bevins. I seem to remember that, as he first was arriving on the scene, I just spontaneously (in the name of comedy) described him as looking very frightened. In the world of the book, the ghosts often have physical characteristics that mimic the nature of their ‘stuckness’ — the reason they are frozen here in this bardo realm. So once I’d described him as being frightened, the natural question was: “Frightened of what?” I find this is often how characters get made: a series of logical questions following upon an initial assertion. Or: to satisfy some simple and pedestrian need in the narrative.

Being dead doesn’t make you a nicer person — this much is apparent when one sees the bigotry among Bevins and Vollman’s friends. And yet, despite their serious differences, the malingerers of the bardo are able to unite when it matters most. Was that a little bit of wish-fulfilment right there? Or do you genuinely believe in all-for-one, one-for-all interventions like these?

No, it really occurred on its own, so to speak. I had no plan for that to happen at all. This sometimes happens — the story seems to grow a mind of its own. What I believe in — or, what this book made me consider believing in, by dramatising it in front of me, without asking my permission — is a phenomenon we might call ‘viral goodness’ — the process by which one person’s positive action inspires or enables another good action, by someone else — a form of role-modelling, maybe. I hear you speaking respectfully to someone, and, without knowing it, I mimic that respectful tone. I also believe in the opposite — ‘viral badness’. In either case, the lesson is the same: our actions matter beyond our limited understanding of them.

The “collage” effect produced in Lincoln in the Bardo — where entire chapters pile on citation after citation from various biographies/books about Lincoln — was this the case from the very first draft and was it a result of your famously rigorous rewriting process? What was your editor’s reaction when you showed him this style for the first time?

My editor was supportive of that move from the first draft I showed him, I think because he felt it essential to the book’s emotional arc. One of the principles in which I believe is that any experimental or odd or reader-challenging feature of a book should be necessary — required by the emotional life of the book. Here, the problem was this: I had, at one early point, a book full of ghosts. And, in the food chain of fiction, ghosts are something like dream sequences — so much control resides with the writer, who can, in those modes, ‘do anything’. So I started to feel like all of this ghostly whimsicality needed the counterweight of a factual spine, just to reel the reader back in, if she was feeling that ‘too-many-degrees-of-freedom’ feeling. And the idea of ‘sampling’ actual historical documents came about when, struggling with how I might provide that factual spine, I asked myself, “Well, how did YOU come to know all of this historical stuff” and answered myself: “Well, I read it in history books.” And a light came on.

Was there ever a smattering of A Christmas Carol on your mind when you wrote this novel? Because there are quite a few parallels between the concept of the bardo and the predicament of Jacob Marley, who is condemned to a liminal, chained state — again, not entirely unlike the limbo that Bevins and Vollman find themselves in.

Oh, sure, yes, I love that book. I think it might be my favourite book of all time. The difference here may just be that Cratchit is being punished, from elsewhere, by someone, for errors he made in life, whereas ‘my’ ghosts are trapped, not by any outside agent, but by their own repetitive habits of thought. Here I was drawing on this Buddhist notions that our minds, after death, will likely work a lot like they work now, only exaggerated by the sudden, freedom-giving absence of our physical bodies. So whatever mind state one happens to be in at the moment of death (or nurtured and indulged in lazily during life) might just continue, super-sized (a cheerful notion, and a good reason to take a look at what our minds are doing right now.)

Is the Bevins character meant to be, among other things, a parody of florid, over-written biographies (that bit about “thousand eyes and thousand tongues”, especially)? When I read the first back-and-forth between Vollman and Bevins, I saw it, among other things, as a conversation between two styles of historical writing, or just writing in general — the incorrigibly descriptive and the rigidly cerebral/pragmatic/hard-nosed. How did you arrive at this distinctive style of bantering between V and B?

Mostly I was just trying to verbally distinguish them from one another, you know? And then that actually produces what we call “character” – the simple desire to have them sound somewhat different from one another tells us who they are as people. I can’t remember which came first here, but I think the order of operations was: 1) Bevins was a suicide, who 2) became stuck in the bardo because, in his final moments, he changed his mind, because 3) he saw how beautiful the world is. This produced: a) his strange physical appearance (Shiva-like: all hands and eyes and ears, the better to experience that beautiful world) and b) his ornate habit of speech, which was in itself a form of thing-celebration. (I am making this all sound a lot more methodical than it really was — the real approach, for me, is always: try to make fun. Steer in the direction that results in the most lively and hard-to-deny prose. After the fact I can sometimes deconstruct the process but I don’t trust this much. Writing, for me, happens in a sort of self-forgetting, iterative frenzy, without much deliberation or planning)

There is an unmissable thread across your bibliography: a certain kind of parental cruelty that is both monstrous, and in some ways, inevitable. In ‘Bounty’, the father’s decision to toss his son over a fence is humane, in the final equation (and also entirely in line with his character). In ‘Victory Lap’, the stringbean athlete’s parents are what you’d call benevolent slave-drivers, while the girl also has her own, distinct issues with parental authority/ interference. It all seems quite fatalistic, in a way, echoing the Larkin “they f*** you up, your mum and dad” line. Do you think there are certain things that no parent does well?

I think it’s a pretty fraught relationship, just because the parent possesses both total love and total responsibility. What else can he do but fail, given that set-up? Total responsibility for that which you loves unconditionally? This is where Lincoln finds himself — if he was Willie’s best and final guardian, and Willie is now dead, where does that leave him? But (to use my favourite phrase, and the holy mantra of fiction), on the other hand — failure is only guaranteed if we maintain too high a standard and too exalted a view of what a parent does. What a parent should hope to do: produce a functional, lovely, happy human being. That seems to be within the realm of possibility. (We have two grown daughters who wonderfully fit that description). What a parent must do, in my view: accept that everything is not, alas, under your control. Kids are born into this world with differing karma, or personality, or fate — whatever you want to call it. We are guiding them but not ultimately causing them, if that makes sense.

You’ve spoken about arriving at your “exaggerated realism” through constant revisions. 21 years after the publication of CivilWarLand, do the stories sound quite as exaggerated as you thought? Follow-up: In the tragicomic era of Trumplandia!® , how difficult will it be for writers to invent outrageous-but-plausible fantasias? (For you, it may be an Orwellian fable: for POTUS, it may be the bill he has to sign before a y-u-u-ge lunch)

Well, I think the interest lies not so much in how weird things are, but in the human reaction to whatever weirdness there is. I am learning a lot about human reaction to weirdness over here, in this new USA, but actually, these things are, of course, not so new. People flushing their previous beliefs, in order to cosy up to power; people caving in to fear; men being newly empowered to abuse women; people in power craving more power at the expense of the less-powerful? All old news, but sad still the same. But also I am seeing: resistance; the power of language to fight lies; people coming together to protect the most vulnerable; really brave funny takedowns of the emerging demagoguery; manifestations of that viral goodness mentioned above. It is all a big carnival, human life, and we should, in my view, be trying to keep the midway clean and safe while enjoying the mayhem.

Did you get a chance to read Paul Beatty’s The Sellout? He, too, presented us with a racism-era theme park from hell, so to speak (I was reminded of both ‘Bounty’ and ‘CivilWarLand’ in parts). When it comes to race, why do we (I’m not only talking about America here) still find it so difficult to operate minus parody, satire or any of the trappings of late 20th and early 21st century irony (the kind explored by, say, the essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’)?

I’m not sure I can answer that, but it occurs to me that difficult truths are beautifully served by humour, because humour is basically comfortable with not-knowing. Humour doesn’t mind not making sense — it only wants to agitate. (I think here of the fools in Shakespeare) And agitation can be a very useful thing. Humour results when you hold up a truth (“I am very good at standing up, better than most”) and another, contradictory truth (The road is icy) and just…let it happen. There’s wisdom in humour but it’s not a wisdom that aspires to control or dominate or (neatly) teach — it doesn’t legislate. So maybe, when something is really unjust, the first job is to show it as such, and trust that the energy of juxtaposition is actually doing some important moral work, of the tearing-down-the-house variety. (I haven’t read the Beatty yet but I have it on my night table and have heard wonderful things about it.)

In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, there is an author’s note where you quote Terry Eagleton: “Capitalism destroys plunders the sensuality of the body”. Your stories — ‘The 400-Pound CEO’ most of all — show how the logical endpoint of free-market capitalism is the loss of bodily autonomy. In the two decades since that story, how far down that abyss are we, according to your observations?

I think it’s getting worse (he says cheerfully.) We are full-blown materialists over here — it’s our new religion. And by materialism, I mean not just that we love things (which we do) but that we have started to disbelieve in mystery — in the notion that there are forces operating beyond our perception, for example. We respect what is: profitable, observable, banal, first-order-powerful, crude, mocking, blunt. We disrespect: the ineffable, the intellectual, the-not- immediately-grasped, the sophisticated, complex (too ‘artsy’). It encourages a kind of aggressive banality. Curiosity is a casualty of materialism, as are compassion and patience with The Other. This is a selfish and degraded philosophy that also negates or denies the connection between people. My only role with respect to you (in this view) is to dominate you and be better than you and isolate myself from you, via power. But (on the other hand!) I am not the only person who believes that materialism is rampant and is committed to working against it.

There are quite a few Panglossian characters in your stories — people who possess an uncomplicated optimism. But like Pangloss, this generally doesn’t end all that well for them — the girl from ‘Victory Lap’, the ‘400-pound-CEO’ himself, some minor characters from ‘Bounty’ and so on. Is optimism well and truly bad news, circa 2017? Should it be nipped in the bud?

I think it depends on how we define ‘optimism’. If we mean the belief that things will always turn out beautifully — I think that’s as nutty as believing that things will always turn out terribly. We see contradictions of both of these views all the time. Things sometimes turn out beautifully and sometimes badly, and sometimes on the same day, at the same party, within minutes. So I think my aspiration would be to just see how things are at any given moment. Don’t try to wish things in either direction. A quiet mind, a loving heart, and a good set of eyes.

If George Saunders is given a grant — or rather, given yet another grant — tomorrow, and instructed to spend the money devising a theme-park-as-conceptual-art, what would he make? And where? And why?

Well, the first thing I’d do is renegotiate, so I could use the grant for a new car or Jet-Ski or a big trip to India, instead of for that theme park. But, if I must: This has no intellectual heft but I always thought it would be cool to have a theme park dedicated to classic television settings. So, you’d have a painstaking recreation of, say, the Petrie house from The Dick Van Dyke Show, you’d have the exact apartment from Friends and so on. And maybe some lookalike re-enactors in each. And the visitor gets a period costume. And is drugged into an agreeable, suppliant state, so that he/she laughs at everything. My dream would be to be the night watchman in that place and get to spend the night in different ‘homes’. We could have a Gilligan’s Island island. Or a Lost island. And just for you, Aditya: the complete set of That 70s Show and a complete 1970s wardrobe to go with it.