3.5
Vigil
ByPublisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “After his spectacular Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders returns . . . with a new novel even more spectacular than the last.”—Los Angeles Times
A “daring” (Time) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Tenth of December, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next
“Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
A “daring” (Time) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Tenth of December, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next
“Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesVigil Reviews
3.5
“I've been a fan of George Saunders' work since I first read his short story collection, Tenth of December, back in 2016. (I've had it in my "Forever Favorites" list on various book-tracking apps ever since.) After it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, I immediately sought out Saunders' first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which then confirmed me as a true George Saunders fan. For the last decade, I've eagerly followed his career and read every book. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, deserves every accolade it has received. I won't even start discussing the masterful craft evident in his 2020 short story "Love Letter"—which in my opinion is his best work of short fiction to date—or we'll be here all day. I've always loved Saunders' skill in balancing humor with emotional poignancy, brutality with grace, the mundane with the surreal. His writing style is rife with "wit-to-power," as Dwight Garner puts it, but that wit has always been grounded in real heart: in an evident love and respect for humanity, for everything we are, despite a clear-sighted understanding of our capacity for harm. I've always come away from a piece of George Saunders fiction with a sort of grimly hopeful awe at the human capacity to change, to shift gears, to reorient ourselves towards something better.
So as you might expect, I went into Saunders' newest novel, Vigil, with eager anticipation.
To be blunt: I felt let down.
While Vigil still has whiffs of classic Saunders—the surreal premise, the borderline slapstick humor lightening otherwise morbid scenes, the attention to interior character voice—the story feels anemic, incomplete. It flirts with hefty subjects like greed, free will, and atonement, but it says nothing substantive about them. The conclusion of the novel, in particular, feels hollow to me, a hurried and muddy ending to a book with little direction.
Vigil is the story of K. J. Boone, a wealthy 87-year-old oil tycoon dying of cancer, who, upon the night of his death, is visited by a spirit (or angel, perhaps) named Jill "Doll" Blaine. Jill is our point-of-view character, our guide through the story just as she is Boone's guide and "comfort" as he lay dying. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boone is less than repentant for the harm he caused in life (an antithesis to Dickens' Scrooge), and the entire novel is Jill grappling with this.
But here's my problem: Jill grapples to no purpose. Because while the story gestures at interesting themes around human selfishness and mortality, determinism and free will, they are ultimately empty gestures that lead nowhere. There's no movement toward any denouement, no sense of turning or of change. Jill remains, in my opinion, entirely unchanged by the end of the story; the only scene that arguably represents meaningful character change is narratively de-fanged, treated as impotent and meaningless. The story remains one flat line from start to finish, which is not only emotionally unsatisfying, but also muddles the themes Saunders attempts to craft. I was left with the feeling that this 175-page novel had nothing much to say.
Where George Saunders' older work has heart and movement, Vigil is a shrug, a half-finished gesture. I'd hoped for more from a writer who's consistently shown better skill than this.”
About George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize, and five collections of stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama as one of his ten favorite books of 2022). Three of Saunders’s books—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Other books by George Saunders
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