Vigil
By George Saunders
Random House, 224 pages, $28
Don DeLillo once remarked, with regard to twentieth-century American fiction, that it is “as though Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next.” What he meant was a turn from fiction that was rooted in reality—in the granularly obsessive depiction of the real—to fiction that was about “systems.” In the work of Pynchon and his progeny, one needn’t concern oneself much with the authentic reality of Tyrone Slothrop or Mucho Maas, and should instead understand these wraith-like figments as an extension of the power structure.
If we extend the analogy, we might say it is as if the day that Pynchon died—or went into occultation or whatever (these sorts of analogies are never to be taken too literally)—George Saunders was born. It is hard to overstate the influence Saunders has on contemporary American writing. He is a writer whose sayings—pithy yet ever so humane—make it onto coffee mugs. Other writers pour out the kind of last-arrow-in-the-quiver praise for him that you would think they would reserve for themselves. David Foster Wallace is supposed to have stood stricken in a hallway at the offices of Harper’s with his shoes untied saying that Saunders was “the most exciting writer in America.” “Saunders is somehow a little more than a writer,” wrote Joshua Ferris. “He writes like something of a saint.”
“Saunders is one of the few writers everyone seems to really like.”
Saunders is one of the few writers everyone really seems to like. Casual readers like Saunders, finding him funny and digestible, but serious literary types also have no problem liking him, and find something to admire in what he does with literary form. He has been an exemplary citizen within the literary community—his short story courses attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers on his Substack. But he is also no mere literato. He comments, sensibly and humorously, on contemporary events. He is originally from Amarillo, Texas, once worked jobs ranging from roofer to doorman to slaughterhouse knuckle-puller, and has never lost contact with regular Americans. In one typically admiring exchange, Jonathan Franzen described him as being “better at striking up a conversation with a Trump supporter than I would be.”
What exactly accounts for the Saunders Revolution? If we factor out all the social points, all the ways in which Saunders has put himself in the bidding to be the George Carlin of his generation, what it comes down to is that Saunders has figured out how to do animation in print. If Pynchon’s Slothrops and Maases were still lightly real people although in the grip of forces beyond their control, Saunders’s characters—the “Mom of Bold Action,” “Downtrodden Mary,” the “Semplica Girls”—belong to a different domain of existence that has the sort of glancing, whimsical relation to our reality that, say, The Simpsons might have to the rest of live-action television. It’s a winning way of writing. Everybody likes The Simpsons, and everybody likes Saunders. His work seems to suit an era where the map has overtaken the territory, and we all have some feeling of being entirely immersed in the pop culture-saturated, sprite-like world he depicts.
The main question about Saunders’s fiction is whether it really scales, sort of in the way that animation doesn’t always work as well at feature-length as it does as morning cartoons. For a long time, Saunders was notorious for being a leading writer who hadn’t actually written a novel, and it was hard to picture what the signature Saunders story would look like in novel form. But when Lincoln in the Bardo came out in 2017, it made sense—he had a great deal of recourse to Buddhist ideas and situated his characters in a liminal, afterlife space, sprites inhabiting their own domain and interweaving in their whimsical, off-kilter ways with our flesh-and-blood world.
That made Vigil, Saunders’s 2026 novel, a genuinely-exciting prospect—an epoch-defining writer, with a new approach to literary fiction, and just getting his feet wet in novelistic form. But it’s a bust—a saccharine morality play on climate change-related themes, as if the Simpsons writers had some kind of contract obligation with the network and had to put out morning programming instructing viewers on how to be good little carbon footprint-reducing children. Even the publications that normally have Saunders’s back acknowledge that Vigil is a misfire. (The New York Times, for instance, accused him of “disappear[ing] up [his] own kazoo.”) The question is whether Saunders just took a wrong turn somewhere or whether there’s something misguided about his whole approach.
As an approach, it can easily collapse into schmaltz, or cartoonishness, but Saunders has some real writerly gifts that always put him on the verge of pulling it off. He tends to be at his best with crisp summations of American life in its decadent, post-industrial phase. He writes of the commerce in a gas station “possessing a fierce yet desultory quality, as if all pleasure had been wrung from the exchange.” The oil baron K.J. Boone, facing death, reflects on it as “the many subsystems that had always given him so much satisfaction shutting down agonizingly,” which is exactly the sort of technical way we think about our own bodies in our particular era.
“Saunders is also capable of more sustained effects.”
Saunders is also capable of more sustained effects. Every time I have a workplace disappointment, or even set foot in a workplace, I find myself thinking of a character, mentioned once in Lincoln in the Bardo—a clerk who lost a vital document and so caused his firm to go under. For a brief moment in the Bardo, he is glimpsed as “a spry young towheaded fellow just embarking upon a new position, full of high hopes, flower in his lapel.” The premise of Vigil—to follow the guardian angel Jill as she gives succor to the dying—lends itself to that same sort of heartbreak.
The book is at its best when it leaves its main plot. At times, Jill takes a break from the thorny moral conundrum of Boone, whose damnation is imminent given his contribution to global warming, and instead wanders around for a kind of nostalgia party in sagging Americana. She visits with the angry Indianan who accidentally car bombed her. She meets a woman who died in a car accident at a gas station and can’t understand how her life could have culminated in a snack run in the middle of a football game. She passes through a wedding and is just overwhelmed by all the small details—“a man’s large hand resting proudly upon the slender back of his date”—as a vivid reminder of everything that she will miss if she does fully ascend and leave this plane behind.
But then, unfortunately, inevitably, Jill keeps having to wander back to Boone, and every time we’re in the Boone sections, we leave the purely literary and are bathed in moral sentiment. The gripping question here is supposed to be whether an oil man,who not only contributed to anthropogenic climate change but funded papers disputing the climatological consensus and supporting the “burn, baby, burn” policies of George W. Bush’s administration can possibly be redeemed. The answer, of course, is: not really. In her empathetic way, Jill travels through the entirety of Boone’s life: his hard-scrabble childhood, his determination to succeed (he is, surprise surprise, driven primarily by “small man’s syndrome”). She is willing to see his actions—all that petroleum-burning, as well as his denial of the science—as an “inevitable occurrence” of his psychology. But that, certainly, is not enough to save him from being conscripted into a demonic cohort by his own corrupt pseudo-scientists.
As you might have guessed, none of this is entirely convincing. The feeling is that Saunders—he of the miniaturist detail, the light aperçu—was bodysnatched by a writer of didactic epics like Richard Powers. He seems to have spent too much time around people with soft voices standing on red dots and saying that free will is a myth and therefore the criminal justice system is inherently flawed; too much time on earnest panels about how the artists of our time have a duty, yes a duty, to deal with climate change. And so, the entire novel is suspended in a facile conundrum: willingly emitting greenhouse gases is unforgivable; but forgiveness may be in order if free will doesn’t really exist.
The reader is left with the feeling that Saunders has boxed himself into a corner artistically. He doesn’t really care all that much about Boone or about Jill. He knows that this is what he should write about, that this is the moral query of our time, but his heart just doesn’t seem to be in it. The two phony climate scientists speaking as if with one voice is cartoonish in the worst sense of the word. And the moment when a think-tanker emits a roomful of think-tank sprites out of his rectum is as clear a sign as any of a writer not really being aligned with his material. With all of your gifts, George, this is the best you can do?
“The reader is left with the feeling that Saunders has boxed himself into a corner artistically.”
The real conundrum sits somewhere behind the novel and is something like the “Ideologists’s Wager.” If you do believe that anthropogenic climate change is the only real issue of our time, then writers do have a duty to deal with that above all else—to the exclusion of the artistic integrity of their own work. And that, unfortunately, is where Saunders seems to have found himself. Jill keeps wanting to leave Boone. We keep wanting her to leave Boone. She makes it as far as her Indiana hometown—“Suddenly I knew what I needed to do,” she says—before some narrative leash yanks her straight back to Boone. And then we’re back in the tiresome scene, like a morality play put on by your medieval town’s theatrical troupe, of all these different figures Boone has interacted with, or who have been affected by global warming, manifesting physically or spiritually by the deathbed and urging him—much to Boone’s annoyance and ours—to renounce Big Oil before it’s too late.
Saunders doesn’t want his book to be a simple morality tale. He keeps looking for balance in the moral reckoning of K.J. Boone. And the point he makes at the end is interesting. All-American sweet angel Jill, having spent fifty years giving comfort to dying Americans, frees Boone and then “elevates.” The point, as I take it, is that a particular generation is absolved—they knew not what they did—but after that, all bets are off. The comfort won’t always be there—with even the comfort-givers growing tired of it. God has been very, very patient with sloppy, lazy, pop-culture-obsessive consumerist America and its endless carbon consumption. He won’t be patient forever.