Book review: Finely-crafted examination of life’s uncomfortable truths at death’s door

'Vigil' explores comfort, repentance, and the path to redemption, which must be sought again and again

George Saunders’ second novel, after his Booker Prize-winning debut, explores repentance and the path to redemption.

• Vigil 
• George Saunders 
• Bloomsbury, €16.99

American author author George Saunders’ second novel,  Vigil, has arrived nine years after his Booker Prize winning novel  Lincoln in the Bardo.

Renowned as a short story writer, Saunders is also a highly-acclaimed author of novellas, children’s fiction, and essays. 

His writing has been categorised as exemplary of what was termed in the 1990s as the ‘new sincerity’, eschewing postmodernist ironic detachment in favour of moral clarity.

Indeed, in Vigil, as elsewhere, he encourages us to see a common humanity living in a shared space. Fiction, he has once said, “has a part to play in urging us, as a species, towards compassion”.

His prose is rich and beautifully crafted; his voice is elegant and witty; his worldview serious and perspicacious.

Vigil, a short novel of 172 pages, explores the moral magnitudes of some of the most pressing issues of our time. 

The novel is narrated by the ghostly Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, a former waitress and phone operator who was accidentally killed at the age of 22.

Jill’s purpose is to be a comforter to the dying, something she has done 343 times since she was ‘elevated’ upon her death into a more enlightened afterlife.

This time, her latest ‘charge’ is KJ Boone, a cancer-riddled oil executive who refuses to take responsibility for his role in the climate catastrophe.

Boone is an unpleasantly arrogant, patronising, and unapologetic old man. 

As Jill enters his consciousness — “the orb of his thoughts” as she puts it — he offers up excuses for the efforts he made to sow doubt in the minds of the public, in some cases by bribing mendacious scientists to publish contrary opinions.

While the novel takes place largely in Boone’s bedroom, it is an allegory of the American Dream, and in a larger sense, of how capitalist rapaciousness is causing planetary catastrophe.

The narrative develops through a series of visitations to Boone by deceased people from his past. 

The dead — people of “our ilk” as Jill describes them — include a contemptuous Frenchman, vengeful scientists, an Indian man whose village was destroyed by flooding, and a remorseful colleague who helped Boone write a disingenuous speech to influence public opinion.

Boone’s family arrive, humanising the character and adding much-needed complexity to his life story.

First his deceased parents arrive. His adoring and forgiving mother is maternally blind to her son’s flaws. 

His scrupulously honest father is there too, ashamed of his son’s dishonesty but admiring his rise from poverty in Wyoming to wealth, influence, and power. 

The living arrive later, in the form of his wife and evangelical Christian daughter.

But if the novel is about the death-spiral of American idealism and mass environmental destruction wreaked by petrochemical companies, embodied by the corrupt Boone, it is also about steadfast hopefulness, represented by Jill. 

Although she is belittled by Boone, Jill is not cowed. At one point, the pair argue about the truth of elevation: “Hooey”, says Boone. “Not hooey”, responds Jill, “truth”. 

At the heart of these arguments is not a difference in perspective, but the moral necessity of being honest, which in the novel attains a religious quality.

In Vigil, Boone’s dishonesty is a “sin” against the earth. Indeed, it is, we learn, through God that Jill experiences her truest self, “to be in touch even briefly with elevation is to know the bliss of being at one with God”.

Vigil is a finely crafted novel that explores comfort, repentance, and the path to redemption, which must be sought again and again.

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