Vigil

An oil executive lies on his deathbed, barely conscious in his palatial home. Despite the cancer ravaging his body, he has no regrets. He has no need for comfort in this final hour, and certainly doesn’t need to be admonished for his choices: he made a good life for himself and that’s that. And yet, the dead still come, lost souls convinced that there is some closure to be found here at the end of this man’s life. Chief among them is Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine – once dead, now driven to comfort the dying – and alongside a strange cadre of fellow spirits, she dredges through his life, trying to understand this man so full of insecurity and impotent rage. In turn, he challenges her, refusing her help and undermining her lofty moral detachment until she herself cannot help but change.

Vigil is a challenging fever dream of a novel that initially left me confounded. Behind its beautiful prose and boundless imagination, I expected some statement, some definitive take from George Saunders about the climate crisis that I could latch onto, but it never really comes. It was only after reading the titular essay from his collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain that I see the point of this denial, Saunders replicating the same refusal to let a reader go on ‘autopilot’ that he so cherishes in Chekhov’s stories. There is no simple answer here, no settling into a judgement that vindicates one character or another. Indeed, all there is to see are those characters, each as complex and contradictory as all people are, each brimming with conviction yet nonetheless still malleable. Unlike his ghostly protagonist, Saunders is more concerned with bringing questions than offering comfort and, as he himself espouses, there is something laudable in that: a writer confident enough to remain unsure.