The thing would be won. 
 Saunders' work views the world from a lens held too distant or too close -- it turns the subject upside down, distorts it, makes it blurred and delirious, but you recognize the outline. He writes about a Civil War theme park with historically inaccurate coolies, and he writes about suburban mothers who collect impoverished foreign children and string them up on the front lawn. The scenarios are, on the face of it, absurd, but the principles and causes behind them are familiar. You look into them and wonder. 
 His first novel, after twenty years of short story collections, moves from the present or the near future to the more distant past. Willie Lincoln, third son of Abraham, dies of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862. He was eleven years old. He would be buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown not long after. His mother would be too stricken with grief to leave the White House, whereas Abraham would come back the night after and visit the grave of his son. 
 From this anecdote, Saunders draws out the lines of his setting. But it is not as silent as the grave, for Lincoln is surrounded by observers and the eyes of a crowd. He splits the narrative into selective quotations from historical sources, interspersed with his fictive characters. The historical sources differ and squabble (some cannot agree on the size of the moon or the color of Lincoln's eyes), and some are full of bile and hatred towards a president who has now been all but sainted. (God damn your god damned old Hellfired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family). 
 The novel is populated by the ghosts of those who have died, but who are distorted by what they cling to in life. One of our narrators, Hans Vollmann, has a swollen groin from missing his wife, whose marriage he has not yet consummated. Roger Bevins is a man who could not live in the closet, and slit his own wrists. He is covered in eyes and ears, the more to see the world that he cannot bear to leave. Of course not all of their lives are so morbid -- there's the man who obsesses over his pickle factory, or the coarse foul-mouthed town drunks who pop in for a bawdy aside. 
 All this is the bardo, or the 'intermediate existence' of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology -- the middle stage between life and death. Those who have not yet renounced their attachment to the fleeting things of the world cannot find a place in what comes after - from greed, from trauma, from attachment, and so on. 
 This has a parallel with Lincoln, who cannot but feel immense, incomparable grief for the loss of his beloved son, and his duty in wartime to protect The United States. The situation in early 1862 was desperate. McClellan had been appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac, and he had done little since. Grant was 'only' a Brigadier General, and news of his success in Tennessee may not have reached Washington by then. In this, the heights of despair, the story moves from a mediation on grief, to making room for other needs and steeling oneself for a greater cause. The thing would be won. 
 Saunders moves from an examination of grief to the panorama of human history. Lincoln becomes a metonym for the United States, and how it came to question itself in a moment of existential crisis. The war would determine the future course and eventual moral purpose of the country. The matter about secession and states' rights in this respect is only a technical matters, just as in retrospect we know the second world war was not 'really' about the Danzig Corridor. 
 Any serious investigation of one's country must take into account its faults, not just its moral aspirations. For every hope of being a refugee for the poor and downtrodden, for every hope of freedom of belief or freedom from want, we must also remember that the nation was founded on war, on driving out and imprisoning the natives, of industry built upon the whipped and broken backs of slaves. If you spent your life trying to find any nation without blame, and you would die looking. But the admission of guilt or miring oneself in despair can only ever be temporary. The person, Willie Lincoln, was here in a brief flash of time, not even a dozen years, before he departed the earth. His father had barely three more years after this, as we all know now. Abraham Lincoln's grief was real and immediate, but he knew that he had to step aside and move towards a consequential state of being, where he would lead men in war and to their deaths, against other fallible mortal men, towards improving the lives of others in a near future. 
 We live in that future. We still have to recognize the impermanence of life, and what right action entails in a world still filled with those who seek to oppress or deprive, divide, or exclude. It is a reminder or a glimpse of a better world, and embodies some of the best of what fiction can attain.