It's a rushing-around day today: first housework, then school prep, then teaching, then grocery shopping, then meeting my son at the airport, and then finally the holiday will begin.

So, in a quick response to Ruth, who spoke of trying to read Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo: It seems to me that one must don the poetry hat to read this novel. The structure feels quite familiar: it's what I did myself when working on the factual-imaginative histories that form my collection Chestnut Hill. I expect, because Saunders is a novelist, he is also manipulating innumerable plot devices, and those will likely become clearer at I get further into the book. But for now I'm coasting, as I would with poems.

This book is also reminding me of Sondheim's musical Assassins--another factual-imaginative history, very episodic and surreal even as it borrows solidly from American history.