George Saunders returns to the bardo in Vigil to confront an oil tycoon

George Saunders’s new novel Vigil returns to the indeterminate bardo between life and death, placing a chorus of meddlesome ghosts at the deathbed of oil magnate KJ Boone. It is Saunders’s first novel since 2017’s Booker prize‑winning Lincoln in the Bardo.

Boone is presented as a long-lived, wealthy postwar bootstrapper who profited from climate denial and remains unrepentant as his body falters. The narrator, Jill “Doll” Blaine, is a spectral death doula who has guided hundreds of souls — 343 charges to date — and faces a moral question: is her role to comfort Boone or to correct the moral record as his mind becomes permeable to ghosts?

The novel invites comparison with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol but, the review argues, Boone differs from Scrooge because he cannot undo the planetary harm he helped cause. Vigil is said to read as a vigilantist fantasy that wants comeuppance for corporate monsters, while also acknowledging that the true violence of the climate crisis is structural and monstrously ordinary.

The review finds Saunders’s ghostly devices — polyphonic chatter, Beckettian riddling and recurring bawdy jokes — increasingly familiar rather than anarchic, and suggests the book can feel like a morality play. By the time Boone takes his final breaths, the question of whether mercy becomes complicity, or whether punitive satisfaction is meaningful, is left to the reader.

Key Topics

Culture, George Saunders, Vigil, Kj Boone, Jill Blaine, Climate Denial