I'm a big fan of George Saunders. I'm not a big fan of this book.

Vigil is a return to the liminal realm between life and death in Lincoln in the Bardo. Spirits are tasked with inspiring repentance and the jettisoning of any moral hang-ups, unresolved feelings, or obstinate aversions to death. They are supposed to "comfort" their "charges" into a peaceful death. Our protagonist is a young woman, Jill, endowed with more significant powers than the other meandering souls, enabling her to soothe the minds of those she enters. She herself died from a car bomb intended for her husband in her 20s.

Her charge this time is KJ Boone, a quondam oil executive, stubbornly unrepentant, aggressively resisting reflection casting anything but the most glowing light upon his many exploits. The friction between them causes her to reflect on her own mortal memories, against her better judgment, and she resolves to put her Self aside and pursue the comforting of her charge. The charge only acquiesces to his guilt the moment he dies, when his contrition is most impotent, but resolves to doggedly pursue changing the minds of his moribund ilk in the oil industry.

This book presents a morality that doesn't lend itself to action. It urges us to be kinder to one another, to do the hard work of seeing ourselves in the lives of others. Self-obsession will never turn a fruitful stone, it is a pursuit without end. Living for the comfort of others is what enables good behavior. I agree with all of this, to a degree; however, when the stakes of this book are climate apocalypse, "be kind" is almost asinine.

Jill's "kindness" is patently unsuccessful with Boone. It is only hearing his living daughter have second thoughts about his character that compels him to reconsider his actions. At one point, there is another spirit sharing KJ Boone as his charge. This spirit is apparently responsible for the invention of oil as a fuel, and has been atoning for decades and decades. He is aghast by Boone's ghoulish behavior, and urges Jill to alter her approach in soliciting Boone's remorse. He ambushes Boone with a barrage of horrific images of climate change: animals dying, families suffering, biomes ravaged. It amounts to little more than Boone's righteous indignation and a bolstering of his emotional ramparts. Nothing seems to alter his perspective except how he's perceived by his daughter.

It seems if one isn't comforted to a point of acceptance or contrition, they wander interminably until they reach it. Perhaps this is one's punishment, a reckoning with one's choices. As far as the living are concerned, however, it is the dead watching out for the dead. The vigil is for those already passed to navigate the afterlife. Boone's pursuit of atonement in death is too little too late, but the book resolves apparently comforted by his volte-face.

There is a deep irony to the word "comfort" here. I would argue the privileging of comfort in contemporary society is the snake eating its tail. It's the very thing which satisfies and destroys us. As Boone repeatedly brings up, the oil industry is the reason we can drive or fly to see our families in the first place. It's the reason the lights turn on, the stove gets hot, the TV glows, and the router has a signal. It's also the water crawling to a boil while we frogs sit inside the pot, blinking stupidly at one another.

The world along [the six-lane avenue] was like the world I had known and yet not like it at all. Some tendency suppressed and kept within decent bounds in my time had been unleashed and any shame about it so intensely rationalized that it no longer occurred to anyone that the swollen ugliness everywhere was a direct result of the heedless indulgence of some pervasive acquisitive hunger.
If I might say it that way.
Greed, greed, one could taste it in the air.

(To quibble briefly: this passage is very well-written, so it is jarring when Saunders abandons it entirely for a thoroughly golly-gee-gosh tone elsewhere. To speak so eloquently about cultural change and also unironically say, "For me to know and you to find out" to a couple of "creepos," makes Jill's tone feel ill-fitting at times.)

Jill speaks of an inevitability in people's character. The man responsible for her death apparently rationalized the entire ordeal over a few years, chalking it up to a bad accident, so to speak, and never really feeling remorse for the life he took. She, maybe as a means of self-soothing despite her residual anger for this man, thinks the following:

Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.
His feelings (of rage, of shame, of being worthless, of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat) were all real and he must suffer them every day, and why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him.

By the end of the book, Jill jettisons her preoccupation with the life she lost. She resolves to comfort those in the throes of death, to rise faithfully to her charge. Materially, though, what does this mean? Doesn't this work out to essentially saying, "It is what it is, but we gotta be nice to each other"? If this book had a slightly different tone, it would feel almost too cynical. It's the Christian-tinged soteriology wherein as long as you repent at the five-yard line, you get your spot in the great beyond. The tone of this book, however, is squishy and revelatory. There is an optimistic sheen over everything.

I struggle to find something beyond the moral catharsis one feels after A Christmas Carol, a story to which this book is probably knowingly indebted. The difference is one character's reversal means some folks in a small town can enjoy Christmas, and another character's reversal contributes nothing to a civilization succumbing to a slow, hot death. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this book, because, being a fan of Saunders, I feel I'm being too crude in my analysis and missing some of the nuance.

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