Book: VIGIL
Author: George Saunders
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 699
Vigil returns to the haunted territory George Saunders mapped so memorably in Lincoln in the Bardo. Once again, the action unfolds over a single night. Once again, the living are encircled by a clamorous assembly of the dead. But where Lincoln in the Bardo braided private grief with national catastrophe, Vigil fixes its gaze on a solitary, contemporary villain, K.J. Boone, an oil executive whose career has been entwined with climate denial and planetary harm, and Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, a dead young woman assigned to comfort the dying as they slip away. But instead of staging a Dickensian moral pageantry — a powerful wrongdoer, a final night, visitations, the possibility of reckoning — Saunders dwells on how fiction itself should treat wrongdoing: whether it should prosecute, forgive, or remain suspended in inquiry.
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders articulated a theory of fiction rooted in the Russian masters he teaches: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol. He argued that great stories generate a series of micro-adjustments in the reader’s expectations. A narrative sets up a pattern, then subtly violates it, creating what he called “a feeling of continuous correction”. Fiction, in this view, becomes a machine for moral recalibration. Vigil operates according to this principle. The novel continually invites the reader toward a conventional response — outrage at the corporate villain, hunger for comeuppance — and then unsettles that stance. The dying executive defends himself in terms that implicate the modern world at large. The reader’s moral footing shifts. Is Boone uniquely monstrous, or merely an extreme node in a vast network of shared complicity? Saunders refuses to provide an answer.
Unlike Lincoln in the Bardo, which wove its metaphysical questions into a collage of historical quotations, invented testimonies and overlapping voices, Vigil feels more streamlined in its design. The earlier novel created a sense of depth by layering fragments from diaries, newspapers and imagined eyewitness accounts, so that no single voice controlled the narrative. This plot relies on a smaller group of characters and keeps returning to the same confined setting. The arguments about responsibility, inevitability and compassion are presented more directly. There are fewer digressions and scant competing perspectives. While this clarity brings a certain sharpness, it also ensures that the ethical questions sometimes feel arranged in advance, as if the characters are stepping into positions in a carefully-constructed thought experiment.
Stylistically, Vigil retains Saunders’s signature tonal volatility. In the space of a single paragraph, the writing can move from something physically absurd — a ghost wedged in a driveway, spirits bickering like impatient commuters — to a quiet meditation on guilt or mortality. The effect feels jarring on purpose. The comedy, in this context, is not there just to make the darker themes easier to swallow. Saunders has often used humour to loosen the reader’s defences. Here, though, the humour tests how long the characters — and the reader — can avoid facing the apocalyptic repercussions at stake. Instead of cushioning the ethical debate, the comedy often sharpens it.
Unfortunately, Vigil does not achieve the emotional amplitude of Lincoln in the Bardo. In the earlier novel, Lincoln’s grief felt elemental. Here, by contrast, the protagonist — or should one say antagonist, given that he is the villain of the piece? — functions more as a moral problem to be examined rather than as a fully dimensional presence capable of surprising the reader. In his teaching, Saunders has long warned against fiction that strains to deliver a lesson. In Vigil, he walks close to that edge. The polemical undercurrent, understandable given the subject, occasionally narrows the emotional field. What remains undeniable is Saunders’s commitment to tension. He does not write to reassure or to present moral exemplars; he writes to unsettle. The repeated clash between condemnation and compassion is not incidental. The novel refuses the satisfaction of clear punishment or triumphant redemption. It makes readers distrust outrage even when outrage seems justified. It insists on examining the impulse to judge alongside the desire to forgive. Vigil thus holds fast to Saunders’s central wager: that art should complicate our certainties rather than confirm them, and that in the space between anger and empathy something like moral clarity might flicker — briefly.