Those ghosts who linger in the graveyard do so because they can’t relinquish some attachment to what they refer to as “the previous place”: three daughters left in the care of a loathed husband a lifetime’s worth of jealously hoarded possessions a body of unpublished scholarly work demonstrating the author’s “genius.” The two primary speakers are a frustrated bridegroom, felled by a building collapse just before his marriage could be consummated, and a young man who killed himself in despair over his homosexuality only to regret the loss of the beautiful world when it was too late.

But I’ve always suspected that Saunders regards such knowingness as merely a more sophisticated mirage: Just because you’ve clocked how power and consumer capitalism operate doesn’t make you any less their bitch. You could argue, as some have, that the accentuated irony in Saunders’ fiction, the gap between how the characters view their plight and how the reader perceives it, flatters his audience’s superior understanding. They cling to false comforts, flimsy self-help nostrums, and dreams corrupted by marketing kitsch (“When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life, etc., etc.”), but it is the clinging itself, and their refusal to jettison their own nagging consciences, that makes them heroic.

His characters are typically pitiable-hirelings and underdogs, experimental subjects and neglected children, the cowed members of families and workplaces dominated by unchecked malignant narcissists-but each one harbors a tiny flame of decency that remains stubbornly lit despite the humiliations and disappointments heaped upon him.

What a difference a few years and a catastrophic presidential election make! The particular flavor of Saunders’ fiction combines pathos with a submerged but fiercely sardonic humor.

Review of lincoln in the bardo