Nothing Worth Staying Up For

Vigil: A Novel, by George Saunders, Random House, 174 pages.

G.K. Chesterton may or may not have actually said, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” but in this, the third decade of the 21st century, the words ring true.

We might want to add a corollary: The first effect of not believing in sin, as traditionally defined by the major schools of religious and moral thought, is to believe in forms of “sin” that are no such thing. Thus, a not-insignificant percentage of the American population tolerates or supports the clear sin of abortion while making social taboos out of the enforcement of immigration laws, the use of plastic bags at the grocery store, or, during the Covid pandemic, the refusal to participate in a masked society. None of these things comes close to qualifying as examples of wickedness except by the standards of a secular culture seeking socially acceptable forms of outrage.

The new novel by the Booker Prize–winning writer George Saunders perfectly reflects contemporary ideas about the sorts of vices in need of repentance. Vigil tells us that the embodiment of all known evil is an oil-energy tycoon who took rightful pride in his contributions to the maintenance of modern society, and who had the temerity to scoff at climate-change extremism. For these alleged transgressions, our protagonist K.J. Boone—we know we are supposed to hate him because he has initials for his name, like a character on the 1980s primetime soap opera Dallas—is not only made to suffer a grim, unpleasant death but is, in the opening pages, visited by a female messenger of God seeking, first, to provide succor during his transition to immortality and, second, to rebuke him (or condescendingly forgive him) for his way of life. Think of it as a combination of A Christmas Carol, Albert Brooks’s movie Defending Your Life, and postmodern literary fiction, with a dose of the animated cartoon FernGully: The Last Rainforest tossed in—but it’s not as good as any of the ingredients.

Until it gets bogged down in environmentalist claptrap, though, the basic setup of the novel is intriguing and, in a refreshing change of pace for a work of contemporary literature, metaphysically curious: The angelic being tasked with caring for (and castigating) Boone is one Jill “Doll” Blaine, who, having lost her life some years back, is now among a special class of heavenly host who descend upon their clientele with overwhelming force. 

“What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second,” Jill says in the opening line of the novel, which is written (often irritatingly) in the first-person. “Below: a fountain. At the center of the fountain: a gold-plated statue. Of a dog. (Someone must have really loved that dog.” This, of course, is the domicile of Boone, who is less a character than a caricature: an amalgamation of habits, preferences, and views that Saunders imagines to be typical of the unscrupulously well-to-do. 

In fact, the home in which Boone lay dying is of multiple homes owned by Boone: there are others in Colorado, Hawaii, and Key West. Drifting freely across space and time, Jill is an omniscient observer prone to utterances such as this: “I cast myself out through the wall, looped over the neighboring yard, had a look down. A wedding. An evening wedding by torchlight.” And this: “I launched out through the wall, floated to the ground, stumbled across the drive, past the auto and the fountain of the golden dog.” What’s more, Jill can assume the identities of others, including a Pennsylvania schoolgirl whose stated unease with changes in the weather—like extreme heat in October and November—is neither as convincing nor pithy as the exhortations of Greta Thunberg. 

Though repetitive, the material concerning Jill’s pliant spiritual state is  at least highly visual and fairly engaging, but the problem is that Boone is again and again presented as being unworthy of her ministrations and deserving only of her call to repentance. It is not just the accumulation of details meant to code Boone as ostentatiously uncouth—for example, the reference to his monogrammed silk pajamas or his neighborhood’s “lazily curved” streets—but the tiresome yet relentless association of Boone’s profession with utter villainy. He is referred to, at one point, as “a bully, a ruiner, an unrepentant world-wrecker,” and, having become aware of his misdeeds through the interrogations of various spectral figures, he refers to himself as “the son of the bitch who destroyed the planet.” 

“Any comfort you give will only serve to confirm him in his current state of delusion,” Jill is told of Boone early on. Delusion that the world needs oil? Will this message fly with ordinary readers struggling to pay to fuel up their cars?

Saunders’s approach to characterizing his tycoon is closer to Doonesbury than to, say, Citizen Kane. “He rolled right over whatever life put in front of him,” it is said of Boone. “He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as high as a guy could go. If he did say so himself. Hired and fired, restructured whole divisions, traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.” See, evil—get it? (Also: Was Saunders thinking of Exxon head-honcho and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when outlining this novel?) We are meant to take Boone’s characterization of the climate-change crowd as prima facie evidence of his buffoonery: “Piss and moan, piss and moan was all they knew how to do. They were losers, trivial people, reckless in speech and action. They took but knew not from whence the bounty flowed.” That Saunders himself was once a geophysical engineer for an oil-exploration company gives this novel a quality of self-flagellation.  

One of the big problems with the book’s politics is that the charges faced by Boone are not so convincing as his own defenses, including his common-sense rejoinder that, in contrast to the apparitions accusing him of wrecking the climate, “some other fellow (ghost, ghoul, whatever) might just as easily have shown up here with a headful of grass-covered hillsides, serene mountain lakes, forests not on fire, unflooded towns, completely dry libraries, meadows teeming with life, thousands of non-dolphin interrupted weddings, a field of, uh, perfectly great what or whatever.” This is not unreasonable. “No great wailing and gnashing of teeth happening over there, far as he could tell, and in fact, wait, listen: What was that? Just now? They were doing the goddamn Macarena or whatever that crap was called.” Again, reasonable.

Finally, that Saunders could conceive of no more shocking example of his protagonist’s wickedness than to have made a fortune in the energy sector is either an indication of artistic impoverishment or, more likely, the myopic worldview shared by so many members of the artistic class. It is not so much infuriating as depressing that a writer of Saunders’s reputation is reduced to climate change talking points that would not be out of place on MSNBC—er, MS NOW. 

At least the talking heads on cable television speak intelligibly. Saunders is a gifted writer. His debut short story collection, 1996’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, demonstrated a deep capacity to communicate American weirdness. His subsequent books have earned their admirers, though his novel Lincoln in the Bardo showed signs of creeping wokeness. But Vigil is not only slight but advertises its slightness by its reliance on numerous one-sentence paragraphs and clipped dialogue presented sans quotation marks. A representative example: “Sins, my ass. Look, he said. You look, she said. Something funny was happening out the schoolhouse window. And don’t look away, she said.” Perhaps inevitably, the book lapses into DeLillo-esque overkill: “TV, goodness, ‘TV,’ ‘television,’ wow, yes: the bright-colored, balloon-lettered MarcusWelbyBandstandLaugh-InFlipWilsonBobHopeShindig thrill of it all!” Ironically, DeLillo’s own classic novel White Noise was a far more potent reflection on environmental catastrophe for having imaginatively realized characters and far less preachiness. Allowances are made for Boone—a rare moment of empathy comes when his wife is seen bringing her fist to her forehead, “as if, by the intensity of the pressure, she might reverse time and restore her husband to health”—but otherwise, the drumbeat is repent, repent. 

In a world teeming with potential bad guys in need of salvation, Saunders aimed low but still missed his mark.

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