Book Review: Vigil
Here’s my review of Vigil by George Saunders. Leave a comment if you’ve read it, plan to read it, or have any book recs to share. Then scroll to the bottom to see today’s writing prompt.
Vigil by George Saunders is a novel that will allow you to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable as it explores sincere questions about life, death, justice, and redemption, in a highly entertaining and sometimes humorous way. It would be an ideal selection for book clubs who enjoy discussing ambiguous premises like the one it seems to posit: comfort at the end of life is essential when recognizing its supposed futility, along with your own, even for the vilest among us… which is clearly bound to generate a ton of debate.
Structurally the novel is easy to follow as we follow a ghost, Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, who is perpetually in limbo, as she attempts to comfort (and potentially redeem?) her ‘charge’, dying oil magnate and climate-change-denying octogenarian, K.J. Boone, over the course of a single day. The two, who communicate telepathically as Boone lies on his deathbed, encounter other ghosts from various backgrounds who keep trying to get Boone to acknowledge and repent for his involvement in the destruction of the planet via his life’s work as an oil tycoon whose constant duplicitous and profit-driven efforts led to widespread climate-change denial and climate change, though he hardly believes he is capable of controlling the weather. Except for his mother, whose ghost maintains that Boone is basically perfect, did no wrong, and bound for glory.
In a sense, the novel reminded me of a contemporary rendering of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, albeit a more chaotic and nuanced rendering that has, as mentioned before, a much more ambiguous ending. Unlike Dickens’ Scrooge, we are left wondering about the fate of Boone, who remains unrepentant until his dying breath, and even after that. While he alludes to the potential for some wrongdoing, Boone ultimately adamantly refuses to regret anything he did during his lifetime. Jill, however, still believes he deserves comfort in the end… or does she? Because the novel seems to suggest that just like Boone, who cannot help himself and who he is, Jill cannot help herself and who she is either: someone who comforts.
“I felt a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive: Comfort. Comfort, for all else is futility.”
“Who else could you have been but exactly who you are? [Jill] said. Did you, in the womb, construct yourself? All your life you believed yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”
Over the course of the novel, we learn about Jill and her living past along with Boone’s, and how she — spoiler alert— even comforted her own murderer, who murdered her by accident when he was attempting to murder her husband, was never caught, and ultimately never felt an ounce of remorse about it. Yet I can’t help wondering: If Jill was so ‘elevated’, why was she stuck in purgatory to comfort others like Boone who neither asked nor wanted her comfort, and in fact told her to get lost? Was it really her choice? Or was her existence also futile and inevitable? Seriously, how does she end up in the same type of afterlife situation as someone like Boone?
While Boone remains certain of himself and his legacy until the bitter end, Jill was pretty much forgotten about after she died, which is likely to leave a sour taste in the mouths of readers who want to see justice and balance restored by the end of the novel. I know that I, for the life of me, cannot see Boone either comforting others or leading others like himself toward redemption on their deathbeds, and even feel the ending of the novel was a bit rushed in that regard. To me, it is simply not viable, especially if we are to believe that our existence is futile. Someone as stubborn and self-assured as Boone would not relent so easily to helping others in the blink of an eye, as we are led to believe at the novel’s conclusion.
Through Jill and Boone, readers are forced to ask themselves serious questions about what will truly matter when we’re lying on our deathbeds, and what and who might comfort us, as well as what comes after and what we’ll truly be held accountable for in the end.
Overall, I did enjoy this novel and all the interesting debates it will surely spark and would recommend it to most book clubs. However, I did feel the ending was inconsistent with the character development throughout the novel, and found it to be a bit rushed and abrupt.
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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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Today’s Writing Prompt
Writing Prompt: Free Write- Money
Set a timer for ten minutes. Once you start the timer, start free writing about money, why it’s important or unimportant, and what it means to you. Write about whatever comes to your mind as soon as it comes to your mind and don’t overthink what you’re writing about. Don’t stop writing until the timer goes off.
