Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

This is an unusual novel.  It has a story arc, it has characters, it has character development.  It just doesn't have continuous stretches of prose.   The entire story is told in either dialog, or in quotations from real or invented historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln's life. It reads a bit like a play, as pointed out by another bookclub member, and apparently there is also an audio book version, which probably works particularly well for this book.  

There was an interesting split in the reactions to the book at our meeting:  the four Canadians liked the book well-enough, or were indifferent to it.  The two Americans thought it was a masterpiece.  Our retired medievalist had a great insight about the split:  the American Civil War is one of the defining events of American history, and a defining part of the American experience.  So a novel about Abraham Lincoln has far more resonance for Americans than it does for the rest of us.

What did I think?  I thought the novel was very well executed.  The characters were well-drawn, as were their tragedies and obsessions. Saunders was very skilled at drawing a story together from fragments -- by a quarter of the way through, I was immersed in the Bardo and Lincoln's life. And I'm embarrassed to admit that it didn't occur to me until after I was finished the novel that some of the 'historical' accounts had been invented for narrative purposes.  In other words, they were convincing.

However, not being an American, I found the novel a bit unsatisfying.  After I finished, I wasn't sure why the author had written it.  What was George Saunders trying to say?  I'll have to accept that his goal was to comment on the Civil War and its place in the American psyche, because the book didn't speak to me.