Booksology There have always been ghosts in George Saunders’ fiction, going back to the revenants of a murdered family that haunt the beleaguered narrator of his breakout novella, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. In Saunders’ most acclaimed book, the 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo—winner of the Man Booker Prize—the characters are almost all dead, spooks hanging around a graveyard where the eponymous president mourns the death of his 11-year-old son. The author’s new novel Vigil, his first in nearly a decade, is no departure. It’s narrated by the spirit of an Indiana woman, a newlywed who died young sometime in the mid-1960s, charged with guiding an oil company CEO through the process of dying.
K.J. Boone, the exec, is a bad man. In the 1970s he made a famous speech to a gathering of his fellow petroleum magnates that provided the blueprint for climate change denial, and he takes credit for the U.S.’s decision to abandon the Kyoto Protocol. This doesn’t matter much to our narrator, Jill “Doll” Blaine, who has so far comforted 342 dying souls, each equally “a person who had not willed himself into this world and was now being taken out of it by force, the many subsystems within him that had always given him so much satisfaction shutting down agonizingly.” But she has an unexpected companion on this job, a spectral Frenchman who wants to see Boone repent for the destruction he’s wreaked on the planet. As Boone sees it, though, he has nothing to regret.
Vigil is an exercise in empathy—or at least understanding—and a rumination on the moral conundrum of guilt and wrongdoing. Neither of those is necessarily a conundrum for everyone, or even for most people. We live in a prosecutorial culture, in which the primary concern in any unfortunate situation seems to be who should be blamed for it. Americans find nothing more satisfying than pronouncing someone an irredeemable villain who categorically deserves to rot in jail, then burn in hell. Saunders, however, is not so inclined. Raised a devout Catholic, he is now a Tibetan Buddhist, and he recently told the Guardian that writing fiction is one of the ways he pursues “a certain view of things in which everyone is just me on a different day, or a different life.”
By George Saunders. Random House.
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Like many of Saunders’ narrators, Jill is a naïf, the product of the quintessential midcentury Midwestern idyll, with loving parents and a golden bridegroom. She’s also a transcendent being—elevated is the word she uses—for whom the memories of the corporeal Jill are a trap. A joyful wedding taking place in a neighboring house distracts her from her vigil with Boone. The celebration summons her own memories of summer barbecues, playing children, the lime-green Chevy Chevelle her father gave her and that ushered her into the teenage delights of drive-in movies and cruising around town with her girlfriends. Saunders invokes the sheer pleasure of these memories with a heady lyricism, even though many of the details, like the word Chevelle, appear in quotation marks to indicate how distanced the “elevated” Jill is from her embodied former self.
The French ghost—who turns out to have “invented the engine” and to be atoning for it—keeps forcing visions and experiences onto Boone to provoke some contrition. He shows the dying mogul the birds made extinct by his deeds, the landscapes devastated, and the human lives destroyed. Boone counters with the lives saved by modern transportation and technology. He likes to point out that the same people who rail against the environmental costs of the oil industry nevertheless travel by car or plane, take for granted the out-of-season produce shipped in from across the world, and are unlikely to die of appendicitis “in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mud.”
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As Boone sees it, he’s a “doer,” an achiever, one of those rare people who have had a substantial impact on the world, a rags-to-riches exemplar who bought a splendid new house for the parents who raised him on a hardscrabble farm and sent them on luxurious trips to Paris and the Holy Land. He is a success, and he’s proud of it. This pride is slightly undermined by the arrival of a few more ghosts—some scientists and a speechwriter, people Boone corrupted into defending the indefensible and obscuring the truth—but the CEO remains stubborn in his refusal to feel guilty.
A reader might expect this story to follow the format of an environmental homily: Some key revelation would finally cause Boone to break down and repent, providing a sense of resolution. Saunders doesn’t seem interested in that, and despite the initially Dickensian premise (a curmudgeon is corrected by a series of ghosts), perhaps the real subject here is Jill herself. She begins with the disinterested concern of a health care professional, the kind of TV doctor who refuses to let the detectives question the gravely injured serial killer because she has a duty of care regardless of the shortcomings of her patient. Eventually, though, she comes to “hate” Boone when she realizes that he knew full well the suffering he was inflicting and simply refused to acknowledge it. Of course, the American Graffiti–style youth that the earthly Jill once enjoyed—that modest yet euphoric paradise—was enabled by men like K.J. Boone, so everyone who partakes of it is also guilty, herself included.
Saunders seems to associate this way of thinking with the old Jill, the physical being who increasingly takes over the ghost as she watches the wedding and recalls the pleasures of her carnal life. The “elevated” Jill, however, sees Boone differently. “Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?” she tells him. “Did you, in the womb, construct yourself? All your life you believed yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.” This is also her view of the odious man responsible for her own death, so she’s willing to bestow this absolution even on someone who has hurt her directly.
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If Boone had free will, and freely chose his course in life, then he is a sinner. But if the elevated Jill is right, he is simply a cog in a gigantic, preordained system grinding on inexorably, and the most any of us can do for him, and for one another, is to show compassion. The first belief is a decidedly Christian one, while the latter veers closer to Buddhism. Which of these views to adopt is the problem Saunders’ novel chews on. Don’t expect a pat answer. The cosmology Saunders has imagined for this fiction is murky. Jill believes she has been given the job of comforting the dying by God—a decidedly un-Buddhist notion—while her French counterpart says the two of them are fulfilling their duties in order to attain “peace.”
Of course, one problem with a novel in which all the characters are either dead or dying is that the real-world stakes are pretty low. Boone has already done all the damage he’s ever going to do, and he’s not in a position to fix any of it. Whether he repents or is punished for his sins will change nothing beyond providing some vindictive gratification to his critics. That is, unless Vigil takes place in a Christian universe, in which case Boone has a soul that needs saving. Or perhaps Boone himself, his guilty ego, is simply the inevitable product of circumstances, a collection of ephemera the sooner shed the better. If this is the riddle Saunders is working through, no wonder his fiction is so full of ghosts. It’s only when they get to the end of their story that they have the chance to figure out what it all means.
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