One of the most celebrated Irish novels of the 20th century is Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s “The Dirty Dust.” A capsule summary explains its notoriety: All the characters, many of them as creatively potty-mouthed as any in literature, are dead. They spend the novel squabbling with one another from their respective graves. Many of their complaints are petty — why is my enemy buried in the classy part of the cemetery, and I’m not? — but the richness of the novel, written in 1949, is in its frank treatment of significant world events, including the activities of the Irish Republican Army and Hitler’s rise to power.

“Lincoln in the Bardo,” the hypnotic if occasionally rambling first novel by short-story master George Saunders, performs a similar feat. Most of the large cast of characters in this novel are “in the bardo,” a Tibetan Buddhist term that refers to a transitional state between one’s death and one’s rebirth.

These Georgetown cemetery residents have their disagreements, one of which concerns a recent arrival: Willie Lincoln, President and Mary Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, who dies of typhoid fever on Feb. 20, 1862.

Much of the action of “Lincoln in the Bardo” occurs on the night of Willie’s death, when Lincoln visits the grave of his son, interred in his sick-box.

Among the other residents are Hans Vollman, a 46-year-old printer who married an 18-year-old woman out of expedience and died before consummating the marriage when a beam fell from his printing office and struck him in the head; and Roger Bevins III, who had a “predilection” he considered “natural and even wonderful,” but others found “perverse and shameful,” among them his lover, Gilbert, whose decision to “live correctly” prompted Bevins to slash his own wrists.

Vollman and Bevins don’t want Willie to tarry along the myriad other characters in the bardo.

When Lincoln visits the boy’s crypt, they decide to use their unique skills to influence the course of Willie’s afterlife, a plan that includes passing through the president’s body to gauge his thoughts and feelings and to help effect a resolution.

So far, so ghostly, but what distinguishes “Lincoln in the Bardo” are two ingenious decisions by Mr. Saunders. One is to create a Rashomon-like symphony of voices and contradictory perspectives, with quotes from actual historical accounts of the period mixed among the laments of the cemetery denizens.

Mr. Saunders draws from works as diverse as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” and “Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House,” an 1868 memoir by Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who was an assistant to Mary Lincoln.

And, as Ó Cadhain did, Mr. Saunders uses his setting as a commentary on politics. Lincoln knew that his continued prosecution of the Civil War meant that, “to do the maximum good,” he had to “[k]ill more efficiently” and “cause more suffering.” “Lincoln in the Bardo” depicts a man struggling to survive personal loss while grappling with decisions that would bring loss to others but that he knew he had to make — Mr. Saunders portrays racism in unsparing detail — for the good of the country.

As sometimes happens when a short-story writer pens a novel, parts of “Lincoln in the Bardo” go on for too long, especially when Mr. Saunders chronicles the backstories of minor characters in the cemetery.

But this is an original and devastating novel about the difficulty of rising to life’s toughest challenges, and a sobering reminder that, as Bevins says late in the novel, we are all “[p]erenially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.”

Michael Magras is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald.

First Published: February 12, 2017, 5:00 a.m.