ArticleIn his final column for The New York Times, conservative writer David Brooks laments America’s loss of faith — faith in institutions, faith in religion, faith in democracy and in the American dream itself. His sobering assessment is that the post-Cold War United States is now a “sadder, meaner, and more pessimistic country”. He writes:
Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.
This post-Cold War nihilism is the backdrop to George Saunders’s latest novel, Vigil.
Here Saunders assesses a life that is committed to power at all costs, but is devoid of integrity, honour or compassion.
Behind Saunders’s exquisite language and hilarious set-ups lurks a piercing assessment of the human condition, alongside some mind-bending philosophical puzzles for readers to wrestle with.
Not quite a dark night of the soul
In Saunders’s characteristically inventive style, he creates a world that is strangely recognisable despite its comic weirdness. The story opens as Jill “Doll” Blaine hurtles to earth from another realm, gradually reconstituting arms, legs, clothes, as she falls head-long towards her next assignment: to accompany a dying man, someone who is about to pass from this life into the next. She is the comforter, “the champion of a cause I would never forsake … To comfort whomever I could, in whatever way I might. For this was the work our great God in heaven had given me”, she says.
Like the characters in Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Jill inhabits a liminal space having died a violent death at the age of 22 — she was mistakenly blown up in her car by an enemy of her policeman husband. As an “elevated” being, she is able to enter her subject’s thoughts, commune with them in their dreams and fly through their walls, transcending time and space.
She has performed her task hundreds of times, but this time things are different. At 87 years of age, billionaire K J Boone lies semi-conscious on a large bed in one of his many mansions. He is an oil tycoon and a climate change denier — he is thus responsible for huge damage to the planet, not only from his own business dealings, but by the active perpetuation of falsehoods that serve to protect his industry and wealth. At one point, he claims to have enjoyed “more actual power than most kings of old”.
There will be no “dark night of the soul” for Boone.
His life is unmoored from a larger spiritual story that might require of him some kind of accountability for his actions.
In the strange midway point between life and death, he is utterly unrepentant for his many sins, arguing, haranguing and resisting every kindness offered by Jill as he justifies a life of appalling cost to others.
But Jill is not alone in attempting to have Boone reckon with his many moral failures. He is visited by both the living and the dead: a Frenchman — likely Étienne Lenoir, the nineteenth-century inventor of the first internal combustion engine — who is regretful of his own achievements, makes multiple appearances to try to convince Boone of the consequences of his life’s work:
I know you, mon frère, the Frenchman said. I was you. A partial man, comically incomplete, shortsighted and greedy, living only for today and what lucre might be wrung from it.
Boone is unmoved by the Frenchman’s interventions and remains aggressively unrepentant. His unwaveringly brutal approach to all who came across his path in life accompanies him on his final, drug-infused spiritual journey.
Others try too. Scores of friends and enemies past, humiliated colleagues, protesting students, his former business partners, the two Mels (Mel G and Mel R) who have sinister plans for his post-life existence. Boone’s father appears too, disturbed particularly by his son’s dishonesty, something he could never abide. Even Boone’s living daughter arrives to visit her dying father. Troubled by a growing awareness of his earthly failures, she seeks to make some kind of peace with that:
“Daddy”, she whispered. “Do you have any idea? What people are saying? About you? On TV and the internet and in so many articles and books and podcasts lately? Is it true? All of it? Any of it? … If so, if you did know and did it anyway? Which, if I’m being frank, I feel was probably, yes, the case? It breaks my heart, and I have to say, because I want, if we are really parting, for us to do so from a place of total honesty.”
He will have none of it. In his semi-conscious state, he calls her (thinks her) a “Kombucha-making hypocrite”, “a dunce”, “a dimwit”. Indeed, he remains a terrible character to his final breath:
He was like a deflated balloon in which, despite all external appearances, there remained one last bit of air.
Or vitriol.
Or spite.
With which someone could yet be hurt.
If he just put his mind to it.
Our narrator remains undeterred in her mission of comfort, even for this recalcitrant ogre. Much of this stems from her commitment to the idea — an important one in this novel — that all of us are, in every way, subject to our circumstances: born at a certain time and place with a particular disposition and distinct, pre-determined way of responding to the myriad influences and experiences of our lives. There is essentially no free will. It couldn’t be any other way.
Her benevolence stretches even as far as her own killer who — a man who, unprosecuted, has lived a long life and forgiven himself for the murderous actions that ended hers. What could he have ever been other than exactly what he was?
“He seemed, if I may say it this way, inevitable. An inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgement”, Jill says.
Later, she comforts Boone with the same sentiment, telling him not to be afraid because he is an inevitable occurrence, the whole game of life amounting to “a kind of lavish jailing”.
In interviews, Saunders says his job as a writer is to leave behind a text that inspires feeling and debate without necessarily having to solve the problem. He has certainly achieved that, but you get the feeling that even his character Jill is not satisfied by her own pleasant-sounding assessment of culpability. She dishes out comically harsh treatment, involving bowel movements and razor blades, to a ghost who treats his wife appallingly, and Jill doesn’t give any thought to what might have “produced” him. Even as she gives the two irritating Mels a firm kicking, they reasonably protest: “Why would you kick us … Why assault us so, when we are lavishly jailed?”
The Frenchman, likewise, is determined to illuminate the implications of her beliefs:
You and your terrible, facile ideas! According to which, anyone may do anything. Anything at all. All is instantly forgiven, no matter what. Tell me, do you believe it? Really believe it? Bad and good are the same? Damage does no harm? The guilty are innocent, the sinner and the saint may both sit at the right hand of the Father, enjoying equal portions?
Saunders appears content to let the reader decide on which side of this debate they place themselves. He is grappling with notions of responsibility, accountability, justice and consequence, free will and personal agency. It is well known that he is influenced in various ways by Buddhist philosophy as well as his Catholic background — and evidence for both has consistently appeared in his writing.
In Vigil, we encounter Eastern notions of letting go of the “self” and the benefit of such a surrender. But evident also is a demand for judgement and perhaps repentance. K J Boone himself has a warped sense of Christianity, interpreting his immense power and wealth as a sign of approval by God. Saunders clearly wants to censure him and those of his ilk for such perversions.
Longing for the beauty of life
There is so much to savour in Vigil. It rewards re-reading to soak in the immense talent of this author — a virtuoso of language and form and imagination. Not a word is wasted in a compressed and compelling narrative. Like so much of Saunders’s writing, it is extremely funny, subversive in its own way, but also compassionate.
Something that stays with the me is the way Saunders is able — ironically, in a story about death and the spirit world — to evoke a sense of longing for and appreciation of the physicality of life.
He does this most powerfully through the way his narrator Jill, living in in an “elevated” state, offers the comfort she was doubtless denied in her own death. But she can’t ever quite let go of what she has lost, and that seems to be what keeps her in this in-between state: beyond death but not fully gone either. “What keeps you here Doll?”, her grandmother asks when making a brief appearance.
Jill is torn between her “elevated” self and the life of the former Jill, young and lovely and embracing life in her small Indiana town. One part of her is “eternal”; the other, “so in love with time and my place in it that I can barely stand it”.
She experiences an aching longing for her previous life and the beauty of it. She misses the emotions, the smells, the wonder of touch and taste and affection. The thrill of being young. The small joys of everyday existence. She is now able to fly great distances, emerge through time and space, not limited by gravity or temporality, but lacks the embodied wonder of being human. She knows she can’t go back. This is such a moving part of the story, and Saunders weaves an appropriate nostalgia for life and what is lost along the way. Every reader can relate, no matter what stage of the journey they are on.
Where’s the accountability?
Vigil novel feels timeless, but also timely. At a time when the powerful rule with ruthless and reckless disregard for the wide-ranging consequences of their decisions on individuals and communities, when deception, cover-up and casual dishonesty are considered part of the game, plenty of us ask:
Where does accountability lie? What hope is there for some kind of cosmic justice?
In Vigil, Saunders lingers on the notion that actions have consequences both now and into eternity.
In this sense the book appeals to a worldview that is unfashionable — in some circles, completely foreign. But it’s not new. For most of human history the idea that the heavens are attentive to our thoughts and actions, such that they will determine the fate of our souls, was the environment most people inhabited. It was the water in which they swam. For the early Christians living under the brutal authority of Rome, the book of Revelation — with its lurid cinematic images of seven-headed dragons, beasts emerging from the sea, and avenging riders with cloaks dipped in blood — provided a vivid portrait of ultimate justice promised to the faithful over the wicked oppressors of the world. Those images have comforted the disturbed and disturbed the comfortable for millennia.
These days, however, judgement — especially if it pertains to me (!) — is anathema in the secular West. And yet, we still long for justice. We protest that the pain of victims must mean something, and that when perpetrators “get away with it” something sacred has been violated.
The Christian vision of a world “put to right”, as Tom Wright puts it, does involve judgement for wrongs committed, justice for victims of oppression and cruelty. There is a weighing of each life and the demand for answers for the litany of human failures. But also, in recognising that everyone of us is deeply flawed, there is the offer of mercy and grace and, yes, forgiveness for the repentant. Even for as ugly a character as K J Boone, were he to choose it.
Saunders himself may not believe that. But in his willingness to ponder these questions he offers an important service in broadening our imaginative scope for what matters most deeply, whether early or late in a life.
Simon Smart is the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics Report.