Lincoln in the Bardo centers on the death of the president’s son, Willie Lincoln, in 1862. However, the novel also reflects on a moment much like the present, in which the day-to-day business of politics gave way to a more fundamental test of principles. Recent debates and scandals have drawn out the “diversity” problems that define the perspectives of those organizations. As a novel about a white hero of the Civil War era by a white author, Lincoln in the Bardo enters this fractious scene with Saunders’s characteristic humor and expansive sensibility. In this respect, it feels more like the last presidential fiction of the Obama era than the first of the Trump administration. Recent books like Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now, and n+1’s MFA vs NYC have illuminated the institutions that support and constrain contemporary American literature.

But this odd and unanticipated historical perspective also makes the novel’s arrival an occasion to wonder about the distinctly white and middle-class political ambitions of literary fiction. The term “literary fiction” usefully describes a set of linked phenomena from the rise of creative writing programs to the changing shape of the market for books. GEORGE SAUNDERS’S Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, offers a surreal and melancholic vision of a presidency in crisis. Its high moral seriousness makes an odd vantage from which to contemplate the grotesquerie of the Trump administration.

In the bardo