I took Saunders’ recent fiction on vacation—needed reading material for the four-hour flight to Arizona. I fully expected to fall in love with this novel. It had all the right things: right author, right subject material (Lincoln is always a worthy subject) and a quirky frame, a narrative about the living and the dead.
Yet the story did not fully fly for me.
The most evocative character was not Lincoln or young Willie but Lizzie Wright, a young, attractive mulatto woman steeped in silence after a life of physical and sexual abuse. Her story is painful to read but the narrative is effective, wenching and all too human, dead or alive. I wish the rest of the book was equally so. The other quirky, sad-sack characters, denizens of the Oak Hill Cemetery, didn’t move me much although there are moments of pathos and irony that are masterful. I wanted more of Lincoln; his characterization was just getting started by the book’s end. And Willie? He remained a pale ghost.
The elements are all there but I think Saunders got caught up in the whimsical styling of the text, which I found somewhat distracting, even annoying. I’m a big fan of fragments but not every other line. For me, the overall impact paled in comparison to say Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or the free-verse epitaph collection of Edgar Lee Masters, The Spoon River Anthology.
In fact, the experimental stye of the novel reminds me a lot of a flash fiction treatment, a form that I’ve read and written in the past—the quick pacing, the intermingling and parallel structure of elements (the fiction vs historical citations), the intense, compacted nature of the inner dialogues, the rich language use, etc. All of that had a familiar, flash fiction feel.
I just don’t think it works in a novel form.
That being said the book has received nothing but praise, readers, writers and critics alike. I think I read Saunders took the Man Booker Prize for this one. I’m rarely a contrarian on literary matters, so not liking the book really surprised me. However, Saunders is a very good short story writer in the way Flannery O’Connor excelled at the form. Yet the first novel O’Connor wrote (Wise Blood) was IMHO positively dreadful.
Being able to jump from short form to novel is a real challenge for a lot of writers. Others have done it, of course, but not all do it well. I’ll be interested in catching Saunder’s second novel if he chooses to write one.
But for the present? I’ll stick with his short stories.
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