We’re only a month in, and already Donald Trump’s presidency seems like something George Saunders would concoct: a regressive, hyper-capitalist fever dream in which language is hilariously corrupted, fairness is thrown out the window, and the foundational tenets of civil society start to give way. As in Trump’s America, so in a Saunders story: Everything seems absurd until it breaks your heart.
Now, after years of success writing short fiction and essays, Saunders has written his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. No one wants their highly anticipated novel to debut just as a bunch of revanchist goblins are rearranging the furniture in the Oval Office, and it is unfair to freight a single book with a bunch of political and existential baggage. But Lincoln is about facing grief (something of a daily exercise for many of us) and is set during a moment of national schism. For those and many other reasons, it is the first essential novel of the Donald Trump era.