George Saunders (1) (1958–)

Summary: Jill Blaine is a spirit who consoles the dying but her current charge needs no consoling, leading her to reexamine her short life.

She’s descending to earth, her body and clothing reconstituted as she falls. “She” is Jill “Doll” Blaine, an “elevated” spirit whose task is to console the dying in their last hours, helping them to come to terms with their regrets, fears, the unfinished. She’s done this 343 times.

But K. J. Boone is different. Lying in his bed in his show more stately Texas mansion, he doesn’t think he needs consolation. As she searches his thoughts she found “a formidable stubbornness. A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to do, see, cause, and create, especially given his humble origins.” And she found no doubts, even as he lay dying of cancer.

Boone was an oil tycoon who rose from working on rigs to leading one of the largest oil companies. At the height of his powers, he gave a speech “debunking” the science of global warming that became a standard reference for deniers. He was a fierce defender of his industry, and all that it had made possible.

But she was not to be left alone with him. Other “spirits” attempt to show him the error of his ways. The Frenchman who invented the internal combustion engine. People who suffered the effects of climate change. And many more from his past. None shake his self-justifications. But many try to make him accountable.

But this shakes her. She recalls how she died as a newlywed. She was blown up by a car bomb meant for her husband. So, she leaves her charge to revisit her Indiana hometown. She enters the mind of the man who planted the bomb. Like Boone, he had no regrets. He considered it an inevitability.

Accountability versus inevitability. Jill wrestles with what that meant in her short life, and what that means for dealing with her charge and the parade of spirits besieging him as his life wanes away. In other words, was it right to assist the spirits trying to wrangle a deathbed turn-of-heart out of him? Conversely, was there a kind of inevitability to the trajectory of his life, one that justified his self-satisfaction? That is to say, did he simply fulfill a predestined course?

These are unsettling questions–the kind that leave you thinking when you’ve put the book aside for other things. Some want Boone to be responsible for the terrible things he unleashed, although Boone pokes at the pretensions of those fueling their environmental activism with his oil. However we think of these things, we think choices matter and want people to be responsible. Yet are not people a part of things larger than themselves that shape them?

It’s a question Christian theologians have wrestled with for two millenia. Are human beings responsible? Yes. Is God sovereign and does God predestine? Yes. I have not met anyone who has satisfactorily explained how both can be so. Yet both things somehow have a ring of truth, explaining something of the way the world is, kind of like light as both a particle and a wave.

And that is what Saunders would have us wrestle with. Is life complicated enough that we must live with the tension? But it seems that all Saunders would afford the dying is comfort for lives they cannot change. However, what if there were the possibility of grace? show less

K.J. Boone, an unrepentant oil tycoon, is lying on his death bed. He is being helped through the transition from life to death by a spectral guide named Jill Blaine, who hopes to help him repent of his many deliberate lies and self-serving "scientific studies" promoting the safety of fossil fuels. He steadfastly refuses to face facts, even on his deathbed: "Therefore he'd had no idea - zero - about those studies. Zilch. About which so many were now blabbing such absolute crap." Boone engages show more in the kind of interior monologue where a character gradually reveal their self-deceptions and lies, which in life have been buttressed by bravado and insensitivity. - but he is a tough nut to crack.

Jill Blaine speaks in a distinctive midwest vernacular which allows for the flattening of the profundity of what is actually going on. It is as if characters from a Roz Chast cartoon have come to life in this celestial struggle and don't know how to frame their thoughts properly, so the word "whatnot" does stellar duty. In fact, the great achievement of this book is the framing of profound truths in terms of Midwestern slang. The register is casual, dismissive, almost insufficient to the task. Words and phrases such as "dillweed", "bitcheroo", "No. Flipping. Way", "that snot-assed look on his or her face," "get away from me dirtbag, pronto" give a sense of the comedic effect of this incongruity. Also evident is, the imprecision of the wording, the groping towards truth, which is deliberate.

Think of The Bone Clocks meets Beetlejuice, and you won't be far off. Think again of Banville's "The Infinities", for a whimsical literary comparison, but Vigil is different in that it is both more immediate and more quotidian. I think Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" may actually be the most useful comparison, in that it handles profound truths about life and death in a deliberately stripped down way, and it uses the American vernacular to do it.

At some point during my reading of Vigil I came to think the book was "cornpone" writing, folksy and unsophisticated, but in the end I came to realize that this is George Saunders' gift: characters coming to realize profound truths through bumbling and ineptitude. Characters being human, in other words. And in the end this is what Jill Blaine realizes, after many futile attempts to persuade K.J. Boone of his sins, that what really counts in this universe is "Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility." Be kind. And in the end the book redeems itself with a transcendent finish, and remains in my head for ever. Yes, this is familiar territory, yes this may seem like "Lincoln in the Bardo" part 2, but it's ok. Saunders may be a one trick pony, but my, what a magnificent pony! show less

Saunders gives us a ghost story. THe protagonist is a "comforter", which is a spirit that is trying to have meaning after her grisly, ironic death. She is sent to comfort a man who is dying and trying (not to) come to terms with the horrible consequences of his rapacious capitalist life. Saunders asks the reader to contemplate death, the ultimate folly of wanting meaning or justice from a life. It has a very Buddhist feel to it and it certainly got this reader thinking about his own show more demise/departure/irrelevance. That said, it is not grim or gruesome but in fact somewhat reassuring in its tonw. show less

Can I do a whole novel of Saunders? I had doubts, and of course there was so much hype that I had doubts. But this was beautiful and moving and challenging and comforting. It's like a Bosch painting. The method and style were intrinsic to the content. Moment stick in my head even months later. Too bad I may never get back the copy I loaned out ...!