Booksology Vigil by George Saunders (Random House) is out January 27.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Penguin Random House
“Have exported this grief. Some three thousand times,” Abraham Lincoln thinks in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, contemplating the death of his young son as the Civil War rages in the background. “A mountain. Of boys. Someone’s boys.” It’s one of the most moving passages in the novel, which was published in 2017 to near-universal acclaim. Racked by pain he can hardly tolerate, the 16th president realizes he is the source of such anguish for scores of others — an agent of death. Lincoln, though, put up amateur numbers compared with K. J. Boone, the subject of Saunders’s new novel, Vigil. The president sent boys to war; Boone, a powerful oil executive, contributed to a global cataclysm that may, according to a recent (nonfiction) projection, lead to 14.5 million deaths by 2050. He has had a hand in altering the planet’s very weather and then funding the campaigns of denial that have stymied government climate action. Boone isn’t inclined toward Lincolnesque soul-searching, but he does recognize his life’s enormity: “Strange but true: he’d had more actual power than most kings of old.”
This reflection comes on Boone’s last night on earth. Dying of cancer in his Dallas mansion, the 87-year-old receives a visit from the book’s narrator, the ghost of Jill “Doll” Blaine, who comforts people in their final moments. She’s joined occasionally by another supernatural figure, an unnamed Frenchman who invented the combustion engine and has spent the afterlife atoning for it. Jill seeks a smooth transition for Boone; the Frenchman, A Christmas Carol style, wants him to face what he has wrought.
Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize, isn’t really about the president or the war. Narrated by inhabitants of the Bardo, it amounts to a prismatic exploration of grief, desire, and self-knowledge — a soulful full-length debut from a recognized master of the short story whose often satirical work is fueled by what it means to be a moral person in an amoral world. In Vigil, staying in the liminal space between life and death but moving the action to the present day, Saunders faces no shortage of potentially big questions to follow it up with. He would seem well equipped to tackle as prickly a character as Boone, a representative of a modern class of business titans who, for all their power, live in a kind of ethical black box.
In his best work — particularly his sublime 2013 collection, Tenth of December — Saunders excels at synthesizing human stories with biting, frequently very funny critiques of the structures that shape our lives: homes, workplaces, social groups, class positions, and really American consumer capitalism itself, whose stupid excesses he sends up in dystopian scenarios. What happens, though, when those excesses transcend the merely stupid, the merely unjust, to become existential? In recent stories and this new novel, Saunders’s fiction has begun to feel both darker and a bit frustrated, spiritually and artistically. You see the problem: What’s a satirist to do in times like these?
A work like Vigil may raise questions about how much empathy (or come-uppance) its villainous subject is owed. I’m agnostic on that, but I do think he should at least be interesting, and Boone is not. He’s a collection of tough-talking clichés, a fountain of conservative boilerplate. His journey from “Wyoming hick nobody” to corporate dominance takes up just a few pages. First he grew up on a farm, envying the “secret society” of golfers he caddies for; next, he’s “part of a tribe” targeted by perceived enemies who just don’t understand business: “They took but knew not from whence the bounty flowed.”
Part of the problem may be that Saunders specializes in losers, hapless folks groping their way through unfathomable social or economic systems, but Boone is a winner. A bigger problem has to do with those systems themselves. In Vigil, they’re practically nonexistent. Afterlife aside, this story transpires in our world, with references to the Kyoto Protocol and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A speech Boone delivers in 1997 is credited with almost singularly persuading the U.S. to abandon Kyoto — a pivot that, like the rest of Vigil, sidesteps the fact that action on climate has been stalled not by an oil executive, or even the oil industry, but by a constellation of business forces, the efforts of one major governing party, and the lassitude of another. The world-historical tragedy of it is that no Boone was required in the making of this particular disaster. It was an ensemble production.
If Vigil describes a world beyond politics, it also describes a world beyond hope with climate devastation a done deal. “This lovely old place, ruined forever, maybe,” one character says. One could have detected that nihilistic note creeping into stories like “Love Letter,” from Saunders’s 2022 Liberation Day, in which a weary old man in an authoritarian near-future U.S. writes to his grandson to say, essentially, “Well, we tried. Sort of.” In Vigil, the only locus of redemption is the individual. Jill, who can access Boone’s consciousness so we can too, explains her belief that each person is an “inevitable occurrence” on whom it would be “ludicrous to pass judgment,” being shaped before birth by forces beyond their control. Not by social or structural forces — poverty, abuse, bad schools, lead pipes — but rather by more ineffable matters of “mind, body, and disposition.” The Frenchman disagrees, and the stakes of this dispute remain unclear. Say Boone recants or doesn’t. What then?
Jill is a curious choice for narrator. Deceased since 1976, she knows nothing of climate change. She’s distracted by memories of her earthly past in small-town Indiana, where life revolved around cheesy Americana: her Chevelle, blue jeans, Coca-Cola, Phil Everly. Many of these memories are from the year of her death — the American bicentennial, we’re reminded more than once. Given the book’s subject matter, it’s especially strange when Jill rues the modern-day gas station — “not the simple cubes of my time but garishly lit fortresses of glass” — and the miserable commerce that takes place there, “as if all pleasure had been wrung from the exchange.” “Some tendency suppressed and kept within decent bounds in my time had been unleashed,” she thinks, unable to see the historical continuity between her time and now, how the cubes were as much a driver of environmental calamity as the fortresses. In Jill’s inability to connect the dots, there’s the outline of something interesting. Rather than see links between the pleasures of her youth and the fossil-fuel economy Boone represents, she’s left to lament the prelapsarian filling station — one of a few compelling themes hinted at but mostly unexamined.
Another concerns Jill’s death at the hands of a ne’er-do-well named Paul Bowman, who blew up a car belonging to Jill’s husband, a cop who had sent him to jail. He and Boone are both instigators of violence, just working at different levels. Like Boone, Bowman believes his misdeeds were justified (Jill has access to his consciousness as well as Boone’s). “It was sometimes necessary to blow a motherfucker up,” he thinks, as Boone considers fossil fuels (not incorrectly) a precondition of American prosperity. Jill can see both the prolonged harms of climate change and the split-second brutality that ended her life. In other words, she has the basis for an urgent moral question, one that arises in the context of an economic order characterized by slow violence, the kind that immiserates people over the long term, denies them health care, and degrades the environmental conditions in which life is even possible. What kind of society regards one of these men as a loser and rewards the other with endless wealth?
But Vigil has no view of systems, no analysis of power. It’s not a polemic or even a calmer exploration of life in the Anthropocene à la Kim Stanley Robinson, who, conceding the scale of the catastrophe, allows for the possibility of organized human ingenuity. I started imagining an alternative version in which the same raw materials — the bloodless businessman, the ravaged environment, the afterlife — are assembled into something leaner, meaner, and more lively: like one by Joy Williams, a hater of the highest literary distinction. They sent a humanist to do a misanthrope’s job!
Vigil’s indifference to realism suggests the possibility of climate allegory, like Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, but it’s too scattershot for that. As cartoonish as Boone is, Vigil is not much of a character study. Nature or nurture, it’s hard to care where he ends up.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 26, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 26, 2026, issue of
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