In a sprawling Dallas mansion, 87-year-old oil company executive K.J. Boone is dying. In addition to his wife and staff, there are some unseen attendants in the room for his final hours. One is Jill “Doll” Blaine. Since dying herself years ago, Jill has been elevated in the afterlife, and now is sent to accompany dying people to provide comfort at the end. She is not expecting any other visitors of her kind, so she is surprised when a Frenchman barges into the room, demanding to speak with Boone. Having died more recently, he lived in a world where climate change ran amok thanks to denialists like Boone, and he wants to make the dying man confront his actions and their repercussions in the hopes that he will repent before death. Jill, not believing it to be her place to judge her charge’s actions, resists the Frenchman’s interventions at first.
While the Frenchman brings visitors to Boone’s bedside to testify about the harmful effects of climate change, Jill grows to question both her worldview and the worthiness of her role in the afterlife. Proscribed to do her best to forget her living self, she instead begins trying to recall the details of her life and the remarkable circumstances of her untimely death.
It’s a premise that feels right up George Saunders’s alley, but sadly, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Jill is just not a compelling enough character to maintain the reader’s interest. The central gag, that she doesn’t quite recall the ways of the material world, just doesn’t compute considering all the time she spends with the living in their final moments, not to mention her ability to enter their thoughts and relive their memories. Why would she then find it hard to remember the names of appliances and various pieces of clothing? Saunders also goes over-the-top indulging in his inclination towards silliness and gross-out humor, as when two demonic spirits, former oil industry acquaintances of Boone, visit him to buck up his spirits and wind up essentially, sorry, pooping out counting smaller versions of their corporeal forms. I honestly don’t know what that was all about. It feels simultaneously obscure and too on the nose somehow.
However you feel about climate change, and I expect that most people who read this will, like me, be in support of the scientific consensus that it’s real and needs to be addressed, I doubt very much you will be entertained by the way Saunders handles it in Vigil. The writing is preachy and didactic and, worst of all, stale. The testimonies of the climate change victims are blunted by the author’s insistence on maintaining the silliness of his premise throughout.
I’m a huge fan of Saunders’s short stories and really enjoyed his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, as well. Vigil is a confounding and profoundly disappointing misfire in light of the quality of his previous work. This is honestly one of the most irritating books I’ve ever read. I could barely stand to finish it at all, which is astonishing considering that it is only 174 pages long. It’s hard to understand how such a great writer could’ve written a book this bad.
