Book review: Vigil

George Saunders’—aka, your favourite writer’s favourite writer; lit fic’s biggest nice guy; another child of Dua Lipa—second novel, Vigil, is both brilliant and limited. As his long-awaited follow-up to his Booker-winning debut, it fails to expand Saunders’ breadth as a writer, but it nevertheless dazzles with its formal daring and kaleidoscopic characters.

Saunders is back with the ghost thing. This time, we follow Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, a spirit who comforts the dying, taking care of an unrepentant oil man, KJ Boone. Over one disorienting night, Blaine tries to console him into honest self‑reckoning as memories, family voices and a parade of living and dead visitors crowd the room. Boone revisits his hardscrabble rise and climate denial, insisting he has nothing to regret, as Jill contends with her own past and the limits of judgment. All the while, a wedding rages next door. Saunders’ dynamic narrative voice leaps and bounds, painting a wider mise en scène of concurrent living and dying. It, perhaps a little too polemically at times, explores the concepts of fate and judgment; how the stories we tell ourselves calcify into something dangerously close to destiny.

Vigil is another tightly constructed, pacey and speculative novel. Saunders’ pioneering innovation with form is again on display. His proclivity for interlacing different perspectives with bold, dramatic prose still defines his style. Saunders knows how to test the limits of narrative form while creating beautiful, precisely engineered moments. This talent for tautly plotted experiments that are, at once, so radical and so meticulously controlled, is what makes Saunders one of the best writers alive. (Evidently, I’m a fan.)

But, is he one of the best novelists? Vigil, like Lincoln in the Bardo, struggles to make itself more than a novella. For all its technical brilliance, it lacks the emotional complexity and realism that we generally expect of a novel. Maybe Saunders is limited by his mastery of the shorter forms, where scenes are distilled to essential beats and characters are painted with swift strokes. Economy comes at the expense of immersion. The longer form is far more unwieldy, and perhaps Saunders is loath to loosen his grip. Without a deeper psychological register, his bid to inhabit a climate-denying oil magnate confronting the truth of his existence ultimately proves unconvincing and underdeveloped. There is also the issue of Vigil’s lack of originality. It has such a striking resemblance to Lincoln in the Bardo—in length, theme, plot and style—that it is certain to be overshadowed by its predecessor.

In many ways, Vigil is a token second attempt for an author who won the Booker with his first; no less extraordinary yet far less impressive. It’s just a shame it took nearly ten years. For me, as a long-time Saunders fan, I loved every word but felt, somehow, unfulfilled.