How to Adapt a Truly Surreal Book
· The Atlantic
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Somewhere in the back of my closet sits a strange relic: a virtual-reality viewer made of cardboard. The only thing I remember watching on it, in 2017, was a 10-minute adaptation of George Saunders’s Booker Prize–winning debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Produced by The New York Times, this 3-D, 360-degree experience was effectively a staged excerpt of the book—which features Abraham Lincoln, his freshly dead 11-year-old son, and a chorus of grotesque ghosts—that could be viewed in full only by constantly swiveling one’s head. Google Cardboard, as this tech was known, was discontinued long ago; a decade later, the most notable thing about this experiment is that it was not the first or the last unconventional incarnation of Saunders’s highly unconventional novel. This week, the Atlantic senior editor Talya Zax admired the boldness of the book’s latest adaptation, an “excellent” and “bizarre” staging at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Her essay inspired me to dip into the Bardo audiobook, which is memorable for being packed with 166 narrators, many of them celebrities. Spoiler: It holds up.
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Zax argues that Bardo benefits from opera’s “freedom to be outlandish,” and that a film version would have to contend instead with Hollywood’s “risk-averse studio system.” The book is surreal, full of overlapping dialogue, madcap characters, and descriptions that defy any visual logic. This much is immediately clear, however: Willie Lincoln, the president’s deceased son, is in a sort of graveyard purgatory, which he must escape before it destroys him. Helping him are three oddly contorted ghosts—a mysteriously damned reverend, a priapic printmaker who never consummated his marriage, and a gay man who died by suicide. Telling the story of Lincoln’s grief at the height of the Civil War, Saunders alternates between snippets from the historical record and the cemetery’s giant cast of specters. This is certainly the stuff of opera. It is also fodder for an audiobook that rises above its stunt casting.
The recording’s collection of notables resembles the slate of an animated Disney movie motivated by star power: Susan Sarandon, Julianne Moore, Ben Stiller, Don Cheadle, Bill Hader, Lena Dunham, Carrie Brownstein, and Keegan-Michael Key all voice characters. The A-listers get the plum roles, of course, and many of them do effectively dramatize the material; Dunham’s teenage girl is affectingly tormented, Key’s enslaved shade righteously wrathful, Hader’s low-class brawler fabulously profane. The documentary snippets are less effective, voiced largely by colleagues and friends, including 60 employees of Saunders’s publisher, Penguin Random House. Then again, this may have as much to do with the doldrums in those segments of the book as the talent of the cast.
The standout performances, however, are from Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, and Saunders himself as Willie’s three helpful ghosts. They have the best material, including sections in which they inhabit the (technically nonspeaking) president’s thoughts. And they showcase what’s best about any effective audiobook. It’s a dramatic rendering, to a degree, but it preserves the interiority and verbal dexterity that only a novel can hold. The banter among this trio is crisp, funny, and layered with meaning, and the soliloquies reminded me that this is Saunders at the height of his power, balancing satire and pathos better than almost any writer I can think of. This eccentric recording is mainstream in one important way: It delivers on its promise of rendering the book faithfully and with a generous dose of flair.
Karen Almond / Met OperaThe Best Kind of Book Adaptation
By Talya Zax
A new opera based on George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo makes some fantastically shocking choices.
What to ReadBeloved, by Toni Morrison
Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness? — Jenisha Watts
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