Three guides, and one guest of honor: Willie Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of the president. The “sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children,” he has caught his death of cold. The novel spans the night of his burial, as his presence upends the order of the cemetery. For one thing, “young ones are not meant to tarry” — unburdened by a lifetime’s accumulation of failures and regret, they usually pass over quickly. But a visit by his grieving father agitates the boy, as well as his graveyard neighbors. Making his way to his son’s crypt in the darkness, the president is an “exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow” who “might have been . . . a sculpture on the theme of loss,” and his demonstration of love calls up all sorts of weird feelings in the lingering souls. “It was cheering. It gave us hope,” Reverend Thomas says, “as if one were still worthy of affection and respect” even in this debased state. Roger Bevins III draws a similarly optimistic conclusion. “We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe,” he says. If the spirits can persuade this boy to undertake his rightful departure to the Other Side, they might be saved as well. It will be a long night.

The souls crowd around this uncanny child. As the cast grows, so does our perspective; the novel’s concerns expand, and we see this human business as an angel does, looking down. In the midst of the Civil War, saying farewell to one son foreshadows all those impending farewells to sons, the hundreds of thousands of those who will fall in the battlefields. The stakes grow, from our heavenly vantage, for we are talking about not just the ghostly residents of a few acres, but the citizens of a nation — in the graveyard’s slaves and slavers, drunkards and priests, soldiers of doomed regiments, suicides and virgins, are assembled a country. The wretched and the brave, and such is Saunders’s magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well. He has gathered “sweet fools” here, and we are counted among their number.

Readers with conservative tastes may (foolishly) be put off by the novel’s form — it is a kind of oral history, a collage built from a series of testimonies consisting of one line or three lines or a page and a half, some delivered by the novel’s characters, some drawn from historical sources. The narrator is a curator, arranging disparate sources to assemble a linear story. It may take a few pages to get your footing, depending. The more limber won’t be bothered. We’ve had plenty of otherworldly choruses before, from Grover’s Corners to Spoon River, and with so many walking dead in the pop culture nowadays, why not a corresponding increase in the talking dead? Are the nonfiction excerpts — from presidential historians, Lincoln biographers, Civil War chroniclers — real or fake? Who cares? Keep going, read the novel, Google later.