Book Review | Deathbed Vigil Still Leaves Key Questions Unasked

Deathbed vigil still leaves key questions unasked

Varun Andhare

Vigil, the second novel by the venerable American writer George Saunders, follows in the footsteps of his first, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017. Saunders is most known for his short stories, which have often, by turns, reached for registers of the absurd, cynical, cosmic and philosophical; debates over his place among the pantheon of literary greats have likely been settled since around the time that I was born.

The story of Lincoln in the Bardo revolved around the eponymous American president grieving the death of his eleven-year-old son, and is revealed through the chattering of several other spirits mired in that liminal space between life and what follows next. Vigil circles back to a similar thematic preoccupation around death and memory: it follows an oil tycoon, K.J. Boone, in his final moments before cancer takes him. Ushering him into the afterlife is a spirit — we’re not sure if she’s an angel — named Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, whose afterlife’s work is to comfort and gently guide her charges through the doors of death.

Yet Boone proves a difficult, malicious bully, resolutely unrepentant in spite of his role in sustaining some of the worst forms of climate denial and ecological destruction of the 20th century. The novel, therefore, becomes an opportunity for Saunders to stage a conversation between himself and, one imagines, a relatively incredulous reader on the possibility of redemption and ‘evil’ in contemporary America.

Saunders cooks with a heavy hand: there is animation and exclamation, a solid dose of the slapstick to the novel’s humour, alongside an acutely naive, caricaturish depiction of Jill. Jill is killed at 22 when a man bombs the car she is sitting in, meant to actually target her husband, who was a policeman. As she ascends into the afterlife, she happens to inhabit the body of her killer, and finds herself radically transformed by the empathy she experiences in the process.

She feels, in Saunders’ words, “a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:

Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility.”

These syrupy Biden-era pieties towards humanity, decency and bearing witness feel particularly hollow in light of the ruthlessness with which the American military-industrial complex denies the same to the millions under its yoke. Saunders’ philosophical project feels well-meaning yet limp and immediately inadequate in the wake of October 7, 2023, and the barrage of horror that has followed. It elides systemic questions of ecological and monetary exploitation for individual greed, and asks, in gratingly didactic terms, what it might take for a person such as this to also experience comfort and repentance.

There might’ve been much more interesting ground to cover had Saunders written this novel in post-genocide America, but that is not the novel he writes. What remains is cold comfort for a readership inured to the pieties that have bound the American psyche for so long. We need new fables.

Vigil

By George Saunders

Bloomsbury

pp. 192; Rs 699