An Uneasy Polemic

George Saunders’s latest ghost story, ‘Vigil,’ is a fanciful, tedious megaphone for its author, rather than for its characters.

By Kazuo RobinsonJanuary 27, 2026

• Fiction

GEORGE SAUNDERS’S NEW “NOVEL” is 174 pages long and has no chapters—or, if you like, is one long chapter. Both it and the 60-page title story in his 2022 collection Liberation Day are narrated in the first person and invent a conceit whereby one character can have a vivid share in another’s experiences across time, using future technology in the earlier story, and here when in a supernatural state existing beyond death. Both works have to explain themselves as they go, and teach the reader some jargon too: in “Liberation Day,” “Speakers” who are “Pinioned” and waiting for a “Pulse”; in Vigil, those of the narrator’s “ilk” are assigned a “charge” whom they must “comfort.” Vigil’s story has more layers and some closure not possible in a shorter work, but it doesn’t quite work. It feels like a short story that has been built up, mainly with flashbacks, into a brief and not altogether satisfying novel, and regular readers of Saunders, particularly of Liberation Day, might wish it had instead been used to comprise a portion—say, 60 pages—of another collection.

The unsatisfied feeling comes from intuiting that Saunders was working toward the same exhilaration intended in the final pages of his celebrated 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which reconnected with yet also transcended history. That novel involved much historical research, with primary sources cleverly collated to give a textured picture of Abraham Lincoln and a somewhat immersive sense of his time. Vigil gives us the fictional K. J. Boone, the world-conquering CEO of an oil company, in a role roughly analogous to Lincoln’s in the earlier novel. Boone was also once a farm boy in the Midwest, but now, from his terrific vantage, he might rate himself above Lincoln, having in fact “more actual power than most kings of old.” Where Lincoln was mourning his son Willie and getting a new perspective on worldly things, Boone is dying of cancer, bedridden, and heavily medicated in the one of the guest rooms of his Dallas mansion.

We learn all this from the narrator, Jill “Doll” Blaine—who doesn’t go by that name anymore because she’s already dead, killed in 1976 by a car bomb intended for her cop husband Lloyd. She and others of her “ilk,” a selected group of the dead, can fly and walk through walls, and they have a special way of communicating and sharing memories with the dying. And because much of Vigil consists of these memories, which take us out of the immediate setting and back in time to a conference of suited evildoers at which Boone spoke, or to his cornpone childhood with its bleating goats, or to Jill’s sentimental honeymoon phase with Lloyd, or into the memories of departed others, the novel sometimes feels weightless, even frivolous.

The perspective, a dead woman’s, is one we can hardly know, so we expect an air of unreality. At first, professionally committed to comforting Boone, Jill mentally pushes away memories of that experience called life, but eventually, as we know she must, she revisits them, flying home to her duplex in Indiana, to her mother-in-law’s house, and so on. Her story, it turns out, has a certain poignancy, and Saunders shows much skill in its manipulation. The wildly excursive analepsis might have worked better if, in Boone’s sickroom, time was slow and settled, but instead, it is a staging room for all sorts of reunions with a wearying succession of dead people from his past. Jill arrives by falling from the sky, right through the asphalt of Boone’s driveway and halfway into the earth.

Saunders has some notion that his dead characters are only vaguely constrained by time and space, so Jill walks through the front door and up the stairs instead of just floating into the bedroom. Being dead, she is alienated from life, so her language is awkward. Along the hallway are hung “numerous paintings in gilt frames, each marked by a plaque mentioning some experience our charge and his wife associated with its acquisition.” Jill is joined by another of the dead, a whimsical Frenchman whose voice is even more stilted than hers. She reports his dialogue: “Might I allow him up into that room, briefly, as a courtesy? Est-il possible? He understood that this might represent an inconvenient interruption of my work.”

Where Lincoln in the Bardo, soon to be made into an opera, was properly theatrical, Vigil offers a nudging suggestion of musical theater, an invocation that’s more tiresome than entertaining. While Jill watches a wedding next door, the Frenchman harasses Boone, trying to make him feel guilty for all the environmental damage his company has done. First, she fights off her memories, then we get Boone’s memories, then those of the Frenchman, who turns out to have invented the automobile engine, making him partly responsible for rising sea levels. For exposition, we have drudgerous dialogue (“honesty compels me to admit”) or rapid flashbacks. The dead can get stuck in the mud, but they are also ghostly and translucent, and somehow Saunders’s mode in Vigil is the same, both tedious and fanciful, mundane and flighty.

At short story length, and with Jill made properly anonymous, Vigil could have been tolerable in its excesses, placed among Saunders’s quieter, smaller creations like “Sparrow” or “My House” (both in ­Liberation Day). Jill’s story, here, is really a backstory, as is Boone’s, and with no revelation connecting them personally, this is too much to get through in a short novel. The result is noisy and unsettled. Considering Saunders’s skill with the diverse materials and voices of Lincoln in the Bardo, one wonders if, in a fuller development of the idea for Vigil, some fabricated documents of Boone’s life might have given contrast to Jill’s narration, slowly building up the case against him as a dishonest and destructive man, though a thick novel inveighing against ecological ruination might be an ugly irony. Instead, the ghosts of Boone’s accomplices make this case, sometimes with glee, sometimes in shame and distress. These are frankly the very worst moments in the novel. In a torturously unamusing sequence, two men named Mel G. and Mel R., whose costumes fluctuate between lab coats and business suits, are brought in to explain how Boone funded skepticism about climate change. They exhort him to be defiant and not admit his guilt in theatrical, rapidly alternating dialogue:

K. J., pal, dear boy: salud! Said G. You really helped us promulgate.

Our views, said R.

Helped us win the day, said G.

And now look, said R. We have won the fight.

The day is ours, said G.

The mannerisms here (the outburst of Spanish, the SAT vocab, the riffing with synonymous idioms) are of a kind that can be found in other passages of Saunders, but rarely have they been as joyless. The Mels G. and R. are deployed to express the outrage that Jill, officially there to “comfort” Boone, cannot, but they can’t do it in character, so one has to accept that they’re using a rhetoric of outrage while inexplicably, beyond death, still committed to the denial of responsibility: “Don’t give in, scout, he hissed down at my charge. Though the seas may rise and the mountains turn to mud and subsume the farms and the forests burn and entire prairies be denuded and through sleeping cities race the very flames of Hell—You didn’t do it, said R.” We do need to know what Boone has done, but why we should be told in this language, from Mel G. of all characters, is unclear. Later, Boone, whose communication has been mostly grunting and swearing, thinks for the eavesdropping Jill’s benefit about what he has done, and he is exhaustively, fastidiously defensive, while admitting to all charges:

He had (had they) helped place those articles in prominent newspapers and whatnot? Had he (they) quoted from those favorable articles, in full-page ads that he paid for I, in the larger papers of the day, and in glossy brochures widely distributed, somewhat omitting (often for reasons of space) the (some might say) tricky provenance of said articles/studies, as well as any mention of certain simplifications/exaggerations/omissions that had possibly been made? He was proud to say that, in his role as its steward, yes, he’d always done his best to protect his organization.

Boone, who has been groggy, thinks quite lucidly here, simply because Saunders needs him to. These are not lines spoken or thought by a character, not really, but are rather the rantings of an angry author passive-aggressively translated into an ostensible admission. It may be a parody of corporate language worked out with lawyers to downplay responsibility, but when anger shows so obviously through the parody, the fun is lost. Saunders has done just enough fictional work to avoid the charge of polemicism, but his disgust at the secular sin of climate change denial has superseded his commitment to character and situation. Boone’s corrupt posture helped make him wealthy, of course, and the subject of wealth will need its own attention. I think it safe to take Jill’s bafflement as a version of Saunders’s own when she says, in explanation of how things got so much worse between her death in 1976 and 2023:

Some tendency suppressed and kept within decent bounds in my time had been unleashed and any shame about it so intensely rationalized that it no longer occurred to anyone that swollen ugliness everywhere was a direct result of the heedless indulgence of some pervasive acquisitive hunger.

This passage has the same headlong wordiness, with its suggestion of anger on the part of the writer, not the putative speaker or thinker. That “pervasive acquisitive hunger” is about to be simplified to “greed.” Jill has been flying over Boone’s wealthy neighborhood, noting that the streets are “lazily curved” like “tremendous snakes” relishing their luxury, which is all rather good observation, and for which Saunders needed this undead, airborne narrator. But the screed about tendencies and rationalizations is his alone, and it fails to answer the question of what has actually happened, offering instead some inexplicable unleashing process that has made people greedier.

As Ryan Napier argued in Jacobin, to judge from Liberation Day, his journalistic work for The New Yorker, and his various public appearances, Saunders was unable (and perhaps unwilling) to understand Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as evidence of deep American problems, instead seeing Trump as some random aberration. As a poem he recited at a DC bookstore had it, “A fragile egomaniac / Has taken up the reins.” The outraged thought of Trump could countenance no explanation, because explanation is also apology. By now, Saunders seems to have moved on from trying to tell everyone that the orange man is bad, but his notions about greed are similar: everything used to be mostly okay, then something was unleashed, somehow, and the United States I once knew has been corrupted. This incuriosity about origins, be they sinful or systemic, is limiting and frustrating him, and it’s likely to derange any fiction that so noisily takes up moral and political concerns.

But the parochial has its charm, and nostalgia is a sweet sickness. Speaking of origins, Saunders was born just a few years after Jill, next state over in Illinois, so if her parts of Vigil are affecting, it is probably owed to the advantage of the author’s experience, as in the case of her complaints about gas stations changing from “the simple cubes of [her] time” into the new “garishly lit fortresses of glass,” or her memories of driving her lime-green Chevrolet Chevelle through town on Friday nights. In Vigil, Saunders has unhappily resorted to speaking through his characters in translated polemic, but his ability to view the world through Jill’s eyes is a considerable artistic gift. To show her distance from her former life, he has her put many remembered phrases in quotation marks, but with time and insinuation, this punctuation loses its alienation effect and begins to express a cautious tenderness. It’s a trick, to be sure, but its cleverness has to be admired, and it leaves no doubt that Saunders sincerely misses the 1970s. The young man’s trash is the older man’s treasure, and this author knows how to make it glitter:

TV, goodness, “TV,” “television,” wow, yes: the bright-colored balloon-lettered MarcusWelby Bandstand LaughInFlipWilsonBobHopeShindig thrill of it all! Ours (our TV, our “set”), in my childhood, sat “just so” on a “cute Asian table” Dad’d brought back “duty-free” from “Manila.”

So cool and all.