The author George Saunders begins his new novel “Vigil” (out now from Random House) from above: Jill “Doll” Blaine is plummeting groundward from some unspecified aerial accommodation — not necessarily heaven — physical form assembling midair as her mind pieces together the mission at hand.
Jill is a ghost who specializes in assisting the dying in their final hours. “To comfort,” she says. “To comfort whomever I could, in whatever way I might.” This time, her charge is an ornery oil titan named K. J. Boone, a shadowy corporate mastermind who spent his life undercutting the public perception of climate science.
“Within him abided a formidable stubbornness,” Jill tells us.
Saunders’ previous novel, 2017’s Booker Prize-winning “Lincoln in the Bardo,” also dealt with post-life purgatory. As in that book, the ghosts in “Vigil” are confused about who they are, where they are and what precisely they’re doing. Saunders, set to speak with author Claire Dederer at Town Hall Seattle on April 7, isn’t quite sold on the afterlife.
“But I think the underlying idea,” he says, “is that if you were well adjusted, you wouldn’t be hanging around. There’s something off about these ghosts. If things had gone perfectly, you’d be in heaven or hell.”
Saunders cites Hans Holzer, a parapsychologist and midcentury ghost hunter who chronicled his extensive findings. “(Holzer) did all these investigations of haunted places,” says Saunders. “He would bring in mediums. And they only ever ran into ghosts who were (messed) up.”
Purgatorial settings are ripe for moralistic parables, and Saunders, who last year became the 38th recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is widely known as a moralistic writer. But when The New York Times’ David Marchese lauded him this January for ethical infallibility, calling him “a kind of secular saint,” Saunders grew bashful.
“I’m anxious,” he told Marchese, “and I’m sometimes pretty grumpy and I’m also way too busy. That secular-saint business — I’m resisting that narrative, because it jars with what I know about myself as an actual person.”
On the level of brass tacks, which is to say, putting words down on a blank page, Saunders is a hugely inventive, detail-oriented writer who has mastered the related intricacies of humor and voice. His characters curse an awful lot. They laugh at bodily functions. They frequently hurt each other. Is this the stuff of saints?
“To me, it’s not really moralism,” says Saunders. “That’s just something someone called me once. I always thought, when I wrote my first book, I want this to be funny. But I want it to be the kind of story where you can’t say, ‘Oh, it’s just funny.’ I want to allow you to care about these characters enough to tolerate the funny. But the fun is the message. If some random guy out there sends you a story, and you crack up, that’s the moral.”
These impulses align to great effect in “Vigil.” For every reflection on morbidity and the meaning of life, Saunders bakes in a sugary layer of the bizarre, such as when two of the tycoon’s old co-workers, Mel G. and Mel R., both ghosts, begin to spontaneously duplicate by his bedside.
“Replicas of the replicas began dropping from the rears of the initial replicas and these secondary replicas grew full-sized and began dropping out tertiary replicas, who also grew, until the room was so packed with full-sized versions of the original G. and R., all talking at once, that several of the replicas were nudged out through the wall and, while still in the process of introducing themselves, tumbled down into the yard below.”
Saunders says of his writing process: “If something is weird, just stick with it for a while. See what happens.”
These fantastic visions help to crack K. J.’s defiant veneer, allowing regret to trickle in. Saunders worked as an engineer in and around the oil industry prior to his writing days; he knows the material well but takes pains to avoid didacticism. “Honestly, I quickly turned away from the idea of this as an environmental novel,” he says. “Because it’s like, who am I lecturing? Anyone who has any sense knows (human-made climate change) is true. And anyone who doesn’t isn’t going to read this book.”
Asked if he imagines that any of his fiction reaches the other side of the political spectrum, Saunders gives a one-word answer: “No.”
Having said that, a strength of “Vigil” is the length that Saunders goes to understand K. J.’s pride and aspiration. “He loved the work and believed in it,” Saunders writes of the dying energy magnate. “He became part of a tribe, a tribe of brothers (and some sisters, yes, even back then) and soon emerged as a leader of that tribe. He’d loved the tribe. Loved it dearly. Was proud to be part of it, thrilled to be giving his days to it and to find himself rising up effortlessly within it.”
These are the signs of a true passion. For K. J., it’s oil. Taken out of context, it sounds like a creative speaking about their craft. “That’s one of the things I was trying to get at,” says Saunders. “I asked myself, at this point in my life, do I have some allegiances that are so fixed I can’t refute them? And, yeah. I think if someone came to me and said, ‘Admit that your whole writing career was a mistake,’ I’d be like, ‘I can’t.’”
It’s a bit of a false parallel. Saunders’ career has been anything but a mistake. Apart from fiction, his 2021 craft book “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” cemented him as one of America’s great literary teachers. And his Story Club Substack is among the platform’s most popular series on the ins and outs of writing.
“I don’t think fiction is fundamentally a tool for moral transference,” says Saunders, reflecting on the legacy of his work. “It’s like, if you listen to some really beautiful instrumental music, is it political? Well, no. Except it is, in the sense that it opens you up to yourself. And that’s a great thing.”
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