As our world grows ever more violently divided, it’s worth recalling that perhaps the best piece written on the U.S.-Mexico border came from the novelist George Saunders, in 2007. Driving up and down the contested area on assignment for GQ, talking to one soul after another, he couldn’t help warming to the reasonable and understanding Border Patrol officers trying to maintain some order. But his heart was also naturally with those struggling to cross the line to find a better, safer life. And he fell in with “likable,” “gentlemanly” Christians on the prosperous side of the divide who nonetheless confessed they were unsettled by the flood of newcomers. Here was a writer who, covering Trump rallies for The New Yorker in 2016, found many of the people with whom he vehemently disagreed “funny, generous with their time … generally, in favor of order.”
Saunders, in short, is in the business of blowing up simple binaries; having quietly maintained a Tibetan Buddhist practice for many years, he seems mostly committed to equal-opportunity empathy. In recent years, his books have evolved into unsparing—though compassionate—inquiries into reality, suffering, and death, made zesty by gangs of supernatural figures who sound like they’re yukking it up at the local bar. In his masterful first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, ghouls and spirits keep chattering away, as if at a corner barbershop, while Abraham Lincoln mourns his dead 11-year-old son, Willie. The result is a literary thangka, or Tibetan scroll, that takes in heaven, hell, and most of the places in between.
It may be no surprise, then, that his new, short novel concerns a death doula of sorts, who tries to comfort a dying man—though the doula turns out to be posthumous herself. And the man she’s attending is an impossible, impenitent oil executive named K. J. Boone, who has no qualms about all the lives his greed has wiped out. So every time the spectral guide—once a 22-year-old phone operator known as Jill “Doll” Blaine—tries to nudge the bully into confessing his sins, he comes up with some self-serving rationale about growth being a “tide that lifts all boats.” As ever in Saunders, poignancy and farce are so wrapped up with one another that we don’t know whether to howl with laughter or with alarm.
Part of what makes Saunders such a daring and inventive original is that he gives us zany, even cartoonish beings who inadvertently become messengers for something sneakily profound. As we watch the disembodied spirits in Vigil pass through one another’s bodies and flit across a decidedly American landscape of cheerleaders and randy couples, we find ourselves zigzagging around states of consciousness like bumper cars at a fair. Saunders himself was once a “budding Republican” who worked with an oil-exploration crew in Indonesia when he was in his 20s, so he knows whereof he writes. And he’s too openhearted to deny all compassion to a “tiny, crimped figure in an immense mahogany bed” increasingly wracked by tears and pain on his last night on earth.
What follows is as impossible to summarize as any small miracle. As the immortal self within the angelic caregiver begins to fight with the everyday 22-year-old girl still alive inside her, Jill finds herself saying rather unangelic things such as “Suck eggs and die, creepos.” The oilman’s deathbed review turns into both vaudeville show and committee meeting, cluttered with uninvited (and vengeful) spectral visitors. “I did no wrong,” he protests at one point. “Yet wrong was done. By me.” Just as we’re about to write him off for all his impatience and deadly indifference, we meet his loving wife, his mom, and his daughter, who has nostalgic memories of the time this Scrooge visited her Junior Miss Bowling class.
Saunders is clearly enraged by all the devastation the climate crisis has brought to millions. Yet he refuses to let rage get the better of him. Life is hard, he keeps reminding us, and none of us is responsible for what we’re born into. The deeds and deceits of Boone, “the son of a bitch who destroyed the planet,” are inexcusable, but we can’t simply write off the hopeful young boy from Nowhere, Wyoming, who worked his tail off to try to support his loved ones. The recurrent mantra that sounds through this metaphysical Our Town is “Comfort, for all else is futility.”
Saunders oversees his antic creatures like a sort of down-home Midwestern guardian angel himself—and like a writer who, in his late 60s, feels his own fears and infirmities drawing ever closer. What we end up with is a jaunty, irreverent, and constantly surprising sermon on forgiveness—or at least on cursing inhumane actions while seeing that the human behind them can never be one-dimensional.
“The canopy of trees overhead,” we read at one point, “resembled a vast mouth in mid-laugh.” The scene that follows consists largely of agony and conflict. Which of us, Saunders might be asking, will not have regrets on our deathbed, and which of us will not wish to keep them at bay? I’ve never read anything like this before—except in Saunders’s earlier excursion into the Tibetan afterworld known as the Bardo. If I’m lucky, I’ll never forget it.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at Air Mail and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, the national best-seller Aflame
