George Saunders’s luminous new novella Vigil begins with a fall of a kind – lower-key, sinless and very funny: “What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.” With the fallen narrator landing headfirst, ass “in the air and fresh new legs cycling energetically,” the story’s tone is set. Though explicitly modeled after Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Vigil is quintessentially Saunders in its combination of user-friendly stylistic innovation, straight-faced satire and a deep dive into Big Moral Questions.
Ever since the spirit/ghost/guardian angel – Saunders himself has confessed that he is uncertain which one she is – Jill “Doll” Blaine was blown to smithereens in a car explosion at 22, she has descended to Earth more than 300 times to console the dying in their final hours. But Jill’s new project, oil tycoon K.J. Boone, is confident he’s done nothing wrong and refuses to be comforted.
Even – in another nod to Dickens – the ghosts of climates past, present and future that visit him with testimony of the natural disasters he’s greenlit fail to elicit contrition from the stubborn tycoon. What with the special difficulty presented by her charge’s unrepentant gall and a wedding being celebrated in the neighboring house, Jill is distracted from her task by memories of her former life as the night goes on, which puts her state of “elevation” at risk.
Like Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil takes place in a porous purgatory spilling onto the land of the living, with its main theme death and its discontents. The macabre and the profound are, as usual with Saunders, tackled from a comical angle. In a scene ranking second only to the talking poop from Franzen’s The Corrections for the award of Best Postmodern Scatological Slapstick, Boone’s devilish former colleagues Mel R. and Mel G. expel replicas of themselves from their rears until the room is filled with them.
In unison, they welcome him into the “black crepe club,” the “swelling-feet-in-forever-shoes club,” the “club of the sudden odor of roses,” and we’re invited to laugh in the face of death. But the question underlying Saunders’s opera omnia, spoken by Jill, is deeply serious: “Once there had been no me and then they’d come along and made me and now I was gone and they were too. What was the point of it all?”
Death holds endless interest for Saunders, who is a Buddhist, because it is a shared and inevitable prospect. Jill’s ability to gain a sympathetic understanding of others (including her own murderer) by entering their bodies, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings is – if not every novelist’s dream – certainly Saunders’s. What this brilliant conceit achieves is the suspension of moral judgment; in other words, it makes the reader, even for a moment, a better person.
Boone is far from likable. When accused of having peddled climate denialism to protect his oil empire, he admits neither to wrongdoing nor regret. But as Jill glimpses his memories of coming up hard on a Wyoming farm and subsisting on worm-ridden charity bread, his drive to make it big at the cost of his conscience becomes relatable. So that she might best accomplish her God-mandated task, Jill recites to herself a mantra: each of us is “an inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to passjudgment.” But the idea that “the sinner and the saint may both sit at the right hand of the Father, enjoying equal portions” is firmly rebuffed by another spirit.
Vigil asks the central question of our time: if judgment alienates and acceptance enables, what transforms us? Whatever the answer, right and wrong are all but immaterial in the face of love, according to Saunders. As the spirits argue over whether Boone is responsible for the drought that killed an entire family of Indian villagers, his wife – oblivious to it all – presses her fist to her forehead in grief: “This earnest indication of love had the effect of causing the three of us to fall silent.”
With Vigil, Saunders once again proves that experimentalism only has a bad reputation because humane, accessible experimentalists like him are in the minority. He respects his readers’ desire for plot, maintains rigorous comprehensibility over any impulse to show off, and the results are spectacular. Every little sentence crackles with comedic and linguistic delight, with freshly coined words such as “wife-crossed” (to describe Boone’s dead hands) and “exhaustion-delirious” (to describe a flock of havoc-causing children). Saunders strives to write within different registers – the rogue-speak of Boone, the moon-eyed musings of a pre-adolescent girl – and mostly succeeds.
Admittedly, readers hoping for the gut-punch his other work delivers so reliably may be disappointed. Even over the novella’s slim length, the impact is diluted. But those who long for food for thought will be nourished by Vigil, a book made to be chewed over long after you’ve finished. Though unlikely to endure down the centuries like Saunders’s short stories, this is very much a book for our times. Hallelujah.
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