George Sauders is a literary darling. I don’t mean that in a sneering way, it’s just a fact. Consider: Among his many awards of literary recognition are a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius grant”) and various mainstream fiction honors including a Booker Price for Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). He teaches at Syracuse and writes about Russian literature. His books make bestseller lists and receive full-length features in the New York Times Book Review, as opposed to the irregular sf/fantasy columns that cover fellow travelers in absurdist speculation about modern times. Thomas Pynchon is a fan; what higher praise is there?

You probably already know all this. If you don’t, if you’ve been hermetically sealed away somewhere (and why would you come out of hiding now of all times?), you might wonder what all the fuss is about his latest book, Vigil.

Part of the reason is because he is a literary darling. And maybe that cuts him some slack.

Like Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil is set in the afterlife, dealing with issues of grief and the necessity of moving on. It isn’t a sequel, though it does share the thematic metaphor of death as a conduit for personal transformation.

While Lincoln in the Bardo is based in the historical (Lincoln’s grief over the death of his son Willie), the supernatural element of spirits who serve as a sort of Greek chorus would ordinarily be termed fantasy. But, since this is Saunders, critics deemed it “experimental,” whatever that exactly means, or magical realism. Presumably the realism is death (and specifically the loss of a child) and the magical bit is the possible afterwards, a fascination of the human species since it started making up stories. And since this is a Saunders story, there are distinctive characters which, despite the absurdity of their situation (in this case being dead), nonetheless are relatable human beings (even if, in this case, dead).

Alas, Vigil is not nearly as clever. While most of the characters exist in a fantastical afterlife, they are also dead on the page when it comes to creating interest. Furthermore, unlike Golden Age science fiction novels in which cardboard characters nevertheless engage with big ideas, the idea here is much more mundane: Climate change is bad; people responsible for climate change aren’t so much bad as misguided; however, people can change.

These days, novels about climate change are often considered “speculative,” rather than genre science fictional as they were in the heyday of J. G. Ballard. This book, then, can be marketed to the mainstream as yet another climate change novel. But there needs to be a little more weight behind an idea than, “Gee, if only the fossil fuel guys would realize what damage they have done.”

Well, what if they do?  Saunders is less concerned with speculating about how to deal with climate change, or how climate change affects humanity, than how someone comes to realize and address their own shortcomings.

Let’s just say we’re more in Matt Haig’s saccharine Midnight Library (2020) land than in Lincoln in the Bardo or Saunders’s own, more trenchant, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996).

The narrator, Jill Blaine, died in her prime back in the 1970s; post-death she is charged with consoling the newly departed, in this particular case an oil tycoon’s somewhat difficult passage to the hereafter. Trouble is, he doesn’t feel the need for consolation. He has no regrets about how his actions contributed to people suffering from climate change and other irresponsible corporate efforts. He has no regrets because he was a singular, pull-them-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of guy.

Boone comes off not so much as a bad guy as a misguided one who did some bad things that he doesn’t think were all that bad; in fact, he thinks they were actually kind of good. What corporate honcho doesn’t?

You did your best. You staked out a certain position. That was how science worked. It was called having a hypothesis. Having staked out that position, you defended it. What supported that hypothesis was “good," what threatened it was “bad” ... When you were in charge of a thing, you did your best to protect the interests of that thing. That was called acting as a responsible corporate steward. What had he done that was goddamn terrible?

As for Jill, well, turns out she isn’t as missed by her husband as she might like to think, dying before women-raising consciousness became a thing (her nickname is telling: “Doll”). So she’s kind of stuck trying to find a purpose in the afterlife. One which Boone is not helping her achieve. But her efforts to do so lead to her own spiritual transformation.

What was I doing here, in this crappo graveyard, in this ugly little town that could never mean anything to me again?

I’d received the gift of elevation from our great God in Heaven himself.

And this was how I behaved?

Elevation was true. It was. For sure.

Me, elevated? Was real. Realer by a mile, at this point, than “Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine.”

All righty, then, I thought.

Gosh, golly, embarrassing.

I must put her behind me forever, that girl who once was, then was no more, and would never be again.

So why might a work so seemingly trite, and predictable, receive so much mainstream literary coverage? It isn’t, ultimately, because Saunders seems such a likeable guy, and probably an equally likeable and inspiring teacher (check out A Swim in a Pond in the Rain [2021] or subscribe to his substack). No, it’s at the sentence level where, like all great craftspeople, regardless of genre, Saunders grabs you.

Here’s the description of the sickbed of K. J. Boone (the name itself points to Old West myths, while the use of initials conjures the scheming oil baron J.R. Ewing of Dallas television fame):

He was dying, for reasons unclear, in the least appealing room of his magnificent home.

A pair of red velvet drapes hung on the eastern wall, as if to frame a view out a window. But there was no window. The space would also have been ideal for a valued painting and no indication that one have ever hung there.

These purposeless drapes seemed part of some abandoned attempt to render the room regal. Above the fireplace hung the helmet from a suit of armor. On a side table near the love seat a set of miniature brass knights was arranged around a lamp as if laying siege to it. This aspiration to regality competes with an earlier attempt at an Old West theme; on the wall above the dresser hung an arrangement of antlers, an old saddle, two Colt .45s in African blackwood display case. An empty medical bed took up what was left of the room, but the speed of my charge’s illness had overtaken him meant that he’d never felt well enough to be transferred to it.

A man is dying, “for reasons unclear.” Because he refuses to accept his own mortality?  Because he is in the Kübler-Ross stage of denial? Or, perhaps most likely—as someone who has lived life confidently if not arrogantly, with the concomitant material rewards (such as his “magnificent home")—he may think, as William Saroyan once remarked during his last days, “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.”

We move on to the description of the room of which the dying tycoon barely is barely aware as he never even felt well enough to move to a hospital bed—though this, too, may be a refusal to admit his fatal condition. The red velvet drapes are a symbol of wealth and royal privilege (“some abandoned attempt to render the room regal”); red velvet also symbolizes comfort, decadence, and power. Not to mention blood. That the drapes surround neither a window nor a picture again indicates a lacking, an inability to see beyond the superficiality of the red draperies, which themselves fail to achieve the intended regal purpose.

While we are told the armor and brass knights compete with the Old West accoutrements, they actually represent similar mythologies that mask underlying realities. Knights supposedly uphold high ideals; historically, as Barbara Tuchman notes in A Distant Mirror (1978), “Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice … In practice [knights] were themselves oppressors, and by the fourteenth century the violence and lawlessness of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”

But Saunders made his mark as a keen satirist of the American dream gone haywire for the powerless—and, similarly, Old West fables of individualistic cowboys (the knights of the time) ignored the violence of vigilante justice, not to mention land grabs and oppression of Native Americans and freed slaves. (In that passage above, we see the “African blackwood display case” containing the Colt .45 revolvers, the legendary “Peacemaker” and romanticized choice of weapon by both the outlaw and the lawman, symbolic of the violence of Old West expansion and exploitation.)

Critics such as Jay McInerney, though, have also cited his streak of artfully-deployed sappiness: “Quite unexpectedly, between guffaws, you find yourself moved. Mr. Saunders is one of those rare writers who can effortlessly blend satire and sentiment.” While this particular blending here is a little too heavy on the sentiment, there’s still much in the mix to appreciate.