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Book Review
Vigil
By George Saunders
Random House: 192 pages, $28
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George Saunders has an affinity for ghosts.
They dominate his 2017 Man Booker prize-winning “Lincoln in the Bardo” with its multi-voice narratives exploring grief and American history. Grief, dying, their consequences and aftermath are again at the center of his slim, second breathtaking novel, “Vigil.” Its inherent themes question what a life is worth and conversely what makes a life worthy. Despite its serious subject matter, the novel is neither morbid nor morose. In fact, there is a great deal of well-meaning dark humor.
A close look at the evocative cover reveals a sneak preview. Zoom in through the dark clouds parting to reveal a figure falling face downward, clearly a female form in stiletto heels descending toward Earth. It’s most likely the narrator, Jill “Doll” Blaine. Death becomes her. She suffered an outrageously ignominious demise in 1976 at 22 years old, mistakenly blown up in her husband’s car. Since then her after-life assignment is to “comfort” others, edging them to “the other side.”
This time her 343rd “charge” is a hapless 87-year old CEO oil tycoon K. J. Boone unwilling to pass over from the “baffling country” of terminal illness toward its “inevitable occurrence.” The novel opens with Jill plummeting into his grandiose Dallas McMansion driveway, arriving in an undignified manner, piercing its asphalt crust, “rear in the air, fresh new legs bicycling energetically, alternately clothed and unclothed.” Her standard work outfit is a “beige skirt, pale pink blouse, black pumps.” Another spirit of her “ilk,” a vivacious French colleague (often exhorting, “Quelle horreur!”), greets Jill and challenges her to lead Boone to “contrition, shame, and self-loathing” for his past actions, but the “short little Wyoming hick,” a self-made unapologetic entrepreneur, is not going to make the next 24 hours easy for her.
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The nearly comatose Boone refuses to recognize his greedy motivation and crucial roles in inventing the “beast” of the combustible engine and the resultant pollution, or convincing the U.S. to abandon the Kyoto Protocol. Not even Dickensian “A Christmas Carol” visitations by the specters of his father and an Indonesian business partner negotiating a project involving a sandstone reservoir with “significant extraction costs” diminish his concomitant guilt and chagrin. Nor can oddball characters, two Mels (G. and R.), like Frick and Frack get him to admit to “any wrongdoing.”
In a very eerie Hitchcock-like episode, the Frenchman returns to remind Boone of his critical part in the climate crisis. A single bird swoops into the sick room, landing on the bedpost. Then, “more birds arrived, of various species, zipping in through the walls and ceiling until they were positively everywhere: hot-footing it along the mantel; offering rapid-fire bows while perched on the rim of the floor lamp’s shade; formed into orderly, phalanx-like rows across the bed (even across the frail body).” The result of an “unprecedented spring heat wave” and “catastrophic wildfires during breeding season.”
In contrast to the danse macabre sequences at the deathbed, Jill overhears the “celebratory sound” of a neighbor’s back yard evening wedding by torchlight. She passes through the bedroom wall, loops over the fence, hovers over the crowd of 211 before landing softly among the congregants. She quickly finds herself becoming “teary” as she did in the past at other weddings, tarnished by recollections of her previous life making the novel as much about her as about Boone. Bittersweet flashbacks recall her Stanley, Ind., childhood — cruising around town on a Friday night in a “lime-green Chevelle,” a gift from her father that was the “source of such happiness.” The irony is that without Boone’s “beast” she would never have had that pleasure.
Seeking “life, love, desire” at the wedding reception, she stumbles upon “thousands of co-arising impressions” including an adulterous affair of the bride’s aunt with her husband’s boss and the “powerful energy” of pantry sex between the married couple, “proof of the daring, special, epic love-bond between them.” It is the distraction she needs from her yet unfinished assignment.
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As Boone’s life on Earth wanes, he is eventually aware that he was “moments away from death,” that he was “old, sick, had endured months of just the most horrendous degrading crap, scans, chemo, different chemo, more scans, blood work, ports, stitches from when he’d fallen in the bathroom, endless consultations after the stitches got infected, the first operation, then the second, and then gone blind in the eye in front of the tumor, had fallen again (stitches in a different part of his face),“ and Jill thinks perhaps he had the “desire to confess something he’d previously been withholding.” She holds out hope that he will atone for a life lived well — squatting before the Great Pyramid of Giza, knee-deep in the “shallows of some high mountain lake” beside his daughter, beaming with his wife on the Great Wall of China, cliffside dining in Positano, a Catacomb tour in Paris where “Mr. Pavarotti sang beautifully” for them after dinner; in the White House Rose Garden, homes in Colorado, Hawaii, Key West — though not well-lived.
Emily Dickinson observes that “Not ‘Revelation’—’tis—that waits, / but our unfurnished eyes.” In the brief, dazzling “Vigil,” Saunders’ vigilant eyes are wide open. It’s a virtuoso achievement, an immersive experience for the reader. Incisive prose (he’s very fond of the colon as a punctuation mark to highlight forthcoming perceptions), engaging characters, and a brilliant imagination give a compelling glimpse into the piquant possibilities of forever.
Papinchak, a former university English professor, is an award-winning book critic in the Los Angeles area.
