Vigil: A Novel

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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 demise/departure/irrelevance. That said, it is not grim or gruesome but in fact somewhat reassuring in its tonw.

At a certain distance all action far below seems inevitable, a consequence of forces realized in that next step, that next statement, none of which could really have been otherwise and so, to be just, not really subject to judgement, to disapprobation, to blame. Even, as in this instance, in the case of a K.J. Boone, oil baron and sly manipulator of general opinion who, against his certain knowledge, promulgated the view that there was some doubt, really a lot of doubt, about the effects of the oil-based economy supposedly polluting the atmosphere and such. Even K.J. Boone might, at his death, be comforted. Jill “Doll” Blaine is tasked with this comfort, such is her “elevation.” But it’s bound to be a long night.

George show more Saunders portrays a world so replete with the dead that there is hardly room for the living, or barely living as in K.J. Boone’s case. There are those (dead) who see it as their mission to get Boone to repent his whole life before making his escape. A tall task indeed. But Jill’s task is to comfort, and not to seek repentance, unless repentance itself might bring comfort to her charge. (Not so much in K.J. Boone’s case.) Which makes her project nearly incomprehensible to those bent on justice or vengeance. But such is their curse, I suppose, which, as Jill might note in one of her elevated moments, is probably inevitable.

The writing here is vibrant and imaginative and full of Saunders’ great technique of getting literally inside the heads of disparate characters. There is obviously a dialogue going on here between Saunders’ deathbed tale and Tolstoy’s “Ivan Ilyich,” but that would take much longer than this brief review note to unpack. Save to say that this is a novel that will linger and on which views might change, even reverse, over time. And that in itself is testament to George Saunders’ artistic genius.

Highly recommended to be read, thought on, and discussed at length. show less

Reading “Vigil” can feel like a case of whiplash. Its almost manic layering of voices and ideas leaves one with a strong sense of chaos. Clearly, Saunders is often deliberately chaotic, and whether that feels brilliant or exhausting depends on how you view his work because “Vigil’s” chaotic feel is certainly intentional. In his work, Saunders frequently mirrors moral and environmental disorder through narrative disorder. The chaos is an atmosphere he creates. His writing can be exhilarating, but it can also feel like simultaneously listening to three radios. Once again, he used this approach in “Lincoln in the Bardo” where he experimented with multiple voices that became realized as a chorus of ghosts.

Another similarity show more between these two novels is their focus on what happens around death. Saunders returns to the bardo in “Vigil” not as a literary gimmick but as a chosen vantage point. In these two novels, he isn’t really writing about death as much as he’s writing about how people avoid seeing reality until it’s too late. In “Lincoln in the Bardo”, the ghosts don’t know they’re dead. In “Vigil”, the dying man doesn’t fully face climate collapse or his role in it. In both cases, denial is his true theme. In effect, Saunders is less obsessed with dying than with the human talent for self-deception.

Clearly, in “Vigil”, Saunders’ literary toolkit is once again on display. He likes choral voices, liminal states, and moral urgency hidden behind absurdity and satire. Some may see this as an emotional core buried under stylistic performance. Yet he deftly moves from the earlier absurdity and almost comic surrealism to gradually coalesce into something morally urgent—climate collapse. The ending reframes what seemed scattered into something substantial. In effect, it dramatizes collective denial and distraction rather than preaching about climate collapse; it uses absurdity to expose the thinness of our moral defenses; and it treats catastrophe not as spectacle, but as something happening amid banal, distracted lives. The emotional payoff sneaks up on you. show less

George Saunders writes the most thought-provoking stories. In that, his newest novella, VIGIL, does not disappoint. Despite its compactness, Mr. Saunders packs a lot into each page, daring the reader to take the time to dig deep into each sentence to get to the heart of what he is trying to tell us.

For those who choose to read at the surface level, VIGIL is a sad little story about a man on his deathbed who refuses to feel sorry for anything he did, even if his actions caused more collective harm to others than most people do. He is unapologetic, sometimes righteous in the beliefs of his own greatness. Jill, his ghostly usher, is sweet and just as firm in her purpose. It is a push-and-pull between the two, interspersed with other show more "helpers" with their own agendas regarding the dying man. It is a sometimes disjointed story, especially when Jill starts remembering her life and death and becomes distracted by those memories, and you find little enjoyment among its pages.

The thing is, I don't think VIGIL is the type of story you are meant to enjoy. There are some funny lines and amusing scenes, but the story is about death, which is rarely, if ever, humorous. Adding to that idea, VIGIL isn't just about death but also about absolution and atonement. Is it something someone bestows on you, or is it enough to believe you did nothing wrong in your life? Does everyone who atones deserve absolution? These are weighty ideas to ponder indeed.

VIGIL does not provide answers but merely serves as a starting point for readers to review their lives' accomplishments and impact on society. Mr. Saunders carefully offers no judgment on his characters, letting each reader draw their own conclusions about legacies, atonement, and absolution. VIGIL is less a story to enjoy and more one that demands more active participation from the reader. As the world watches an American president frantically attempt to put his name on as many buildings and structures as possible in a last-minute effort to create a lasting legacy, VIGIL proves eerily prescient, timely, and worthwhile. show less

George Saunders uses some of the same devices from Lincoln in the Bardo to consider the death of a person who did bad things for the world while alive. Should he be comforted at the end because he was a person? Should he be tormented by those he injured until he begs forgiveness? Will we be zooming around in the afterlife hunting down those who wronged us and haunt them on their deathbeds? As is often the case, Saunders doesn't offer the answer to these questions but rather leaves use musing.

Questions of fate and forgiveness aside, this is a climate change novel. If, like the characters, we only come to see our role in environmental destruction once it's too late, well, there's no saving the real us. Best hope for an interesting and show more lively afterlife then. show less