In the opening moments of Vigil by George Saunders, we plummet alongside Jill “Doll” Blaine as she reconstitutes mid-fall, her beige skirt and pale pink blouse materializing atom by atom, her favorite black pumps clicking into existence just before she crashes headfirst into an asphalt driveway. This spectacular entrance sets the stage for what becomes Saunders’s most ambitious and morally complex work to date—a novel that wrestles with accountability, environmental catastrophe, and the possibility of redemption in an age of corporate-sanctioned destruction.
The Architecture of the Afterlife
Saunders constructs a metaphysical landscape where the recently deceased serve as psychopomps, shepherding the dying through their final transition. Jill, our narrator and guide, has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three times since her own violent death in 1976—killed by a car bomb meant for her police officer husband Lloyd. Her role typically brings comfort to the fearful, easing souls across that terrifying threshold between life and whatever comes next. She speaks with the authority of experience, her voice alternating between the elevation she’s achieved through centuries of service and the colloquial patterns of the young Indiana woman she once was.
The genius of Vigil by George Saunders lies in this dual consciousness. Jill exists simultaneously as an enlightened spiritual being and as “Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine,” complete with memories of Chevelles and movie-films, PrettyPetals and Jardine’s Smorgasbord. This bifurcated existence becomes the novel’s central tension—can we transcend our earthly selves, or do we remain forever tethered to the accidents of our birth, the limitations of our understanding, the choices we made when we didn’t know better?
A Man Unmoved by Consequences
K.J. Boone, the dying oil CEO at the heart of this narrative, presents Jill with her most challenging assignment. Unlike her previous charges, Boone harbors no regrets. He built an empire from nothing, traveled the world, advised presidents, commanded respect. The fact that his industry’s deliberate obfuscation of climate science contributed to planetary devastation doesn’t trouble his conscience. He didn’t invent oil. He didn’t create the demand. He simply supplied what the world wanted, what it needed—or so his internal monologue insists, with the defensive gymnastics of a man who’s spent decades perfecting his justifications.
Saunders captures Boone’s voice with devastating precision. The short, declarative sentences. The rhetorical questions that brook no actual inquiry. The habit of addressing imaginary opponents (“Look, Jacques…”). This is a man who built his identity on being right, on winning, on rolling over obstacles like the “tank” his wife once called him. The prose rhythm itself becomes an extension of character—Boone’s thoughts don’t meander or question; they assert, defend, attack.
Spectral Interventions and Moral Reckonings
The bulk of Vigil by George Saunders unfolds over a single night as a parade of supernatural visitors attempts to pierce Boone’s armor of self-justification. A Frenchman who invented the internal combustion engine arrives, tormented by the unforeseen consequences of his innovation, carrying an impossibly tall stack of papers documenting environmental destruction. Birds representing endangered species fill the room—hooded warblers, Allen’s hummingbirds, lark buntings—each one a testament to ecosystems disrupted and habitats destroyed. Mr. Bhuti materializes, a recent arrival from Rajasthan who died alongside his wife and mother during a catastrophic drought, their bodies shriveled, their urine turned black as coal.
These visitations build not toward conversion but toward resistance. Each challenge only hardens Boone’s resolve. He deploys the familiar arsenal of climate denial: cherry-picked data, appeals to complexity, whataboutism, the comfort of collective guilt. If everyone’s responsible, then no one is. If the science was uncertain (it wasn’t), then doubt was reasonable. If his actions were inevitable given his circumstances and psychology, then how can he be blamed?
The Philosophy of Elevation
Saunders threads throughout this narrative a concept Jill calls “elevation”—a spiritual state achieved by releasing attachment to the self. The idea draws from Buddhist philosophy but wears it lightly, filtered through Jill’s distinctly American idiom. To achieve elevation means recognizing that the self is an accident, a random assemblage of genetics and circumstance, and therefore both praise and blame become meaningless. You are inevitable. An inevitable occurrence. Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?
This philosophy offers profound comfort, suggesting a universe without true culpability, only the mechanical unfolding of cause and effect. Yet the novel interrogates this comfort mercilessly. If Boone is inevitable, so too is the Frenchman’s invention, Mr. Bhuti’s death, the melting ice caps and the burning forests. Elevation risks becoming another form of abdication, a spiritual bypass that preserves the ego by dissolving it into cosmic determinism.
The most powerful moments in Vigil by George Saunders occur when Jill herself wavers, when the elevation she’s cultivated threatens to collapse under the weight of her resurgent humanity. Memories of Lloyd flood back—his broad hand on her back, his terrible jokes, their summers trying for a baby. She visits her grave in Indiana, discovers Lloyd remarried and had three children, lived to 2023, and never once searched for her spirit in all those years. The man who killed her, Paul Bowman, lived into his nineties and forgave himself completely.
A Daughter’s Testimony
The novel’s emotional apex arrives when Boone’s daughter Julia rushes to his bedside. Her attempted prayer becomes an indictment disguised as forgiveness, a litany of grievances wrapped in Christian charity. She loved him. He was difficult, demanding, often cruel. She forgives him—but does he understand what people are saying about him? The documentaries, the podcasts, the articles? Is it true? Did he know all along?
This scene exemplifies Saunders’s greatest strength: finding the messy human truth beneath ideological positions. Julia isn’t a climate activist delivering a righteous speech. She’s a daughter who wants her dying father to be good, to have been good, and who’s confronting the possibility that he wasn’t. Her confusion and hurt feel utterly real, her attempt to square her childhood memories with historical reckoning genuinely moving.
The Landscape of Loss
Saunders’s environmental vision operates on two registers simultaneously. There’s the grand, apocalyptic scale—flooded libraries in Kolkata, beetle-ruined birch groves, dolphins beaching themselves during weddings—and there’s the intimate, textural observation of decline. A Texas forest where sick trees lean against dead ones, where the root system runs black underground, where leaves seem too brittle to survive the slightest touch. This double vision mirrors the novel’s central concern: how do we hold both the specific life (Boone’s, Jill’s, our own) and the totality of destruction in mind simultaneously?
The prose in these passages achieves a kind of documentary precision, cataloging loss without sentimentality. There’s no purple prose about nature’s grandeur, only careful notation of what’s been diminished, what’s been lost, what continues to struggle. It’s writing that trusts the reader’s capacity for extrapolation, for feeling the full weight of “fish nibbling corpses in a lakeside graveyard” without needing that weight explained.
Narrative Innovation and Structural Play
Vigil by George Saunders demonstrates the author’s continued evolution as a formal innovator. The novel employs a fluid point of view that can shift from Jill to Boone to other characters in a single paragraph, creating a kind of collective consciousness that mirrors the novel’s philosophical preoccupations. We’re simultaneously inside multiple minds, experiencing the permeability of consciousness in death’s proximity.
The prose itself modulates wildly—from Jill’s quotation-mark-enclosed memories of “Chevelle” and “pup-tent entry” and “Heinz brand camping beans” to Boone’s clipped corporate-speak to the Frenchman’s French-inflected English to the wedding guests’ inner monologues. Yet it never feels like showboating. Each voice emerges from character, and the polyphony creates a richer understanding of how differently people experience and process reality.
Questions Without Easy Answers
What makes this novel so powerful—and potentially frustrating—is its refusal of easy resolution. Boone doesn’t experience a deathbed conversion. Even after all the supernatural interventions, he maintains his innocence, his righteousness, his conviction that he did nothing wrong. The Mels arrive to claim him, to rope him into an eternity of encouraging other dying oil executives to remain unrepentant. Only Jill’s intervention frees him, and even then, he joins the Frenchman not out of genuine repentance but out of something more complex—a kind of horrified recognition that maybe, possibly, he got it wrong.
The novel asks: Is this enough? Can someone who spent a lifetime in willful blindness achieve redemption through belated recognition? And more troublingly: If we accept the philosophy of elevation—that we’re all inevitable occurrences, products of circumstance beyond our control—does that absolve us of responsibility for the harm we cause?
Echoes of Saunders’s Earlier Work
Readers familiar with Saunders’s oeuvre will recognize continuities with his previous explorations of death and consciousness. Lincoln in the Bardo similarly populated the liminal space between life and death with a chorus of voices, each trapped by their attachments and misunderstandings. The stories in Tenth of December and Liberation Day frequently featured characters confronting moral complexity in systems designed to obscure it. But Vigil by George Saunders pushes further, attempting to hold both cosmic forgiveness and earthly accountability in the same trembling hand.
The novel shares DNA with other works grappling with climate catastrophe and corporate malfeasance—Jenny Offill’s Weather, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing—but Saunders’s approach is characteristically slantwise. Rather than depicting environmental collapse directly, he shows us its psychic aftermath, the metaphysical reckoning that must occur when a man who profited from planetary destruction finally faces what he’s done.
The Wedding and the Dying
One of the novel’s most effective structural choices involves the wedding happening next door to Boone’s death. Throughout the night, Jill keeps drifting over the fence to watch the celebration—the dancing, the toasts, the bride and groom sneaking away to the pantry. These scenes pulse with life, with desire, with the ordinary human hunger for connection and joy. They serve as a counterweight to the death room, reminding us what’s at stake in these abstract discussions of planetary futures.
But Saunders doesn’t romanticize the wedding guests. They’re complicit too, in smaller ways—flying to destinations, driving cars, consuming without thinking. The novel suggests we’re all caught in systems we didn’t create but from which we benefit, all trying to live meaningful lives within a structure designed for extraction and exploitation.
A Novel for Our Moment
Vigil by George Saunders arrives at a moment when we’re all reckoning with culpability, with legacy, with the question of what we owe to the future. It’s a novel about oil executives, yes, but also about anyone who’s ever made a choice that privileged comfort over consequence, anyone who’s ever known something was wrong but did it anyway, anyone who’s ever constructed elaborate justifications to preserve their self-image.
The prose crackles with energy, with linguistic invention, with Saunders’s characteristic blend of hilarity and heartbreak. But it’s also a demanding read, one that asks us to sit with discomfort, to resist the pull of easy answers, to hold multiple truths simultaneously. It’s not a perfect novel—the middle section occasionally bogs down in its own metaphysical machinery, and some readers may find the ending’s ambiguity more frustrating than profound.
Yet its imperfections feel appropriate to its subject. How do you write the perfect novel about imperfect people navigating an impossible situation? How do you resolve narratively what remains unresolved in reality? Saunders wisely doesn’t try. Instead, he gives us Jill, plummeting again at novel’s end toward another charge, another opportunity to offer comfort, another soul to shepherd across the threshold. The work continues. The dying keep dying. And we, the living, keep making our choices, accumulating our regrets, hoping that when our time comes, someone will be there to help us cross over, to tell us we did okay, even if we didn’t, even if we couldn’t have done otherwise, even if that distinction no longer matters.
Books Similar to Vigil by George Saunders
Literary Fiction with Environmental Themes:
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Weather by Jenny Offill
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Death and Afterlife Explorations:
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Corporate Critique and Moral Complexity:
Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Trust by Hernan Diaz