Booksology George Saunders’ “Vigil” takes place over the course of one eventful night. But after finishing this novel, you may feel you have traveled much farther in time.
Mixing earthly and spiritual realms, Saunders packs a lot into the final earthly hours of K. J. Boone, a former oil company CEO currently in his bed dying at his Dallas mansion.
Just landed in his room (by floating up and through the walls) is Jill Blaine, a spirit who introduces herself to Boone as an “elevated” being who comforts a person on their passage from this world into the next.
In “Vigil,” Saunders’ 13th book and second novel, the idea of comfort has a larger meaning than its earthly definition of easing pain. For Jill, under the direction of, as she notes, a “vast, beneficent God,” to bring comfort means to enable a person to truly see themselves as they leave this life. It’s a route to peace paved with tough love.
Jill knows immediately that with Boone, she has her work cut out for her. She senses how “a steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through” him.
Boone is a business titan who, as he tells Jill, “traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.” Boone grew his huge oil conglomerate in part by devising ways to undermine the science of climate change. Even now he complains to Jill that climate agitators are “trivial people” who refuse to acknowledge just how much fuel is needed to power their cars and fill their homes with goods shipped from around the world.
While he’s talking, the room loudly fills with birds and animals grievously harmed by his company’s actions. Into this cacophony appears the Frenchman, the spirit of the 19th-century inventor of the internal combustion engine. He doesn’t care he helped to create modern life; he is only focused on the damage his design has wrought on the planet.
The Frenchman urgently advises Jill to more quickly bring Boone to a state of “contrition” and “shame.” Jill holds her ground (and is a little annoyed by his mansplaining). She understands that comfort is also truth wrapped in compassion, and compassion can take a little time.
Beings from Boone’s life come and go – including coworkers, family, and the gleefully unscrupulous scientists funded by his company to create “scientific” studies favorable to the oil industry. Some look as they did in life, others have macabre appearances. As in the Booker Prize-winning “Lincoln in the Bardo” with an entirely different cast of spirits, here actions in life can alter a spirit’s shape in the afterlife.
In a tale filled with many memorable individuals, it is Jill Blaine – forever 22 years old, forever wearing a “beige skirt, pale pink blouse, black pumps” – who is this novel’s most poignant and distinctive character. With her own challenges in life, she carries an enduring impulse to do good.
As he does in his short stories, in “Vigil,” Saunders exhibits that rare ability to make you laugh and blink back tears within the same paragraph, phrases so gracefully conceived you barely notice how you got from one emotion to another until you’re already there.
These nighttime visitations may also seem reminiscent of “A Christmas Carol,” but there are essential differences. The Dickens classic is a redemption story based on the belief that every person possesses the ability to change. “Vigil” also offers the possibility of redemption, but its foundational belief about destiny and choice is made of more mixed matter.
Loath to admit his role in the planet’s deterioration, Boone leans into his bullying side, calling Jill a “ditz” and a “moron.” Exasperated, she flies from Boone’s house for a brief respite.
Her sojourn far from Boone’s Dallas neighborhood opens up the novel beyond the climate question. As Jill encounters others in this in-between realm, big questions of fate and personal responsibility are raised, though sometimes in a muddled fashion. But mostly Saunders offers just enough well-chosen detail on individual spirits for you to further speculate how they arrived at their current state – and what that may portend back at the house for Boone’s own imminent journey.
In the fantastical sphere depicted in “Vigil” and in our own human domain during these turbulent times, what is better to offer than the godly directive that Jill follows: “Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility.”
Hosted by Harvard Book Store, George Saunders will be in conversation with author Paul Tremblay at Back Bay Event Center on Thursday, Jan. 29.
