Everyone dies – that’s inevitable. Everyone also wonders at some stage what it must feel like. In this exquisite (and short) novel from George Saunders, the very end of life has never seemed so eventful, so colourful, so … exciting.

Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine is already dead. She’s acting as a ghostly doula, tapping into the consciousness of a man shortly to die. She’s been ‘elevated’ to this position and has already successfully helped over 300 people pass over from life to death. Her latest charge however – self-important, arrogant, stubborn – is not cooperating. In life, KJ Boone was an oil tycoon and had been at the vanguard of the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to discredit global warming. He’s visited by a dead Frenchman who bemoans his 19th century invention of the internal combustion engine (not named but, presumably, Étienne Lenoir). Neither he, nor KJ’s past associates can get him to repent. With her charge refusing to engage, this doula is forced to confront her own life. Jill died young in the 1970s. She was the victim of a car bomb meant for her policeman husband, Lloyd.

There’s a wedding happening next door and its revelry stirs Jill to revisit her past. The more she remembers, however, the less ‘elevated’ she becomes. The right balance, though, might just help with KJ’s transition.

The narrative style in Vigil has crossovers (pun intended) with Lincoln in the Bardo, with humorously weird characters and very idiosyncratic narrative voices. The humour underlies the timely satire of entitled, out-of-touch billionaires for whom money is more important than the planet.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Saunders is the author of numerous books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. The audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo, which featured a cast of 166 actors, was the 2018 Audie Award for best audiobook. ­

His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection).

He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

He was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Visit George Saunders’ website