Review of Vigil by George Saunders

I love a book that explores issues around mortality. Vigil, by the author of the strange, wonderful novel Lincoln in the Bardo, introduces fascinating elements such as fate, responsibility, and forgiveness, yet Saunders doesn't dig into them, which left me feeling unsatisfied with this slim book.

Vigil has been one of my most-anticipated reads of 2026.

In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders explored the worlds of characters existing in limbo between life and death. His novelVigil touches on mortality and deathbed reflections.

The story involves the otherworldly "Doll" Blaine, who is preparing to usher yet another soul peacefully into death. But her charge, K. J. Boone, is a powerful, wealthy oil company CEO facing his end with no regrets. Many live and beyond-the-grave souls demand a reckoning with Boone, requiring apologies and recognition--and often disputing Boone's accounts of events. This all leaves our main protagonists Doll and Boone in uncharted territory as death draws nearer for the earthly former executive and he refuses to take responsibility for grave harm to the earth and those living upon it so that he may pass peacefully into the next world.

Doll's own memories flit in and out, and she experiences moments of clarity about her past. Remembering her worldly life causes her form to become temporarily more solid and her emotions stronger (and shows us that truthful consideration of the past is, in Saunders's story, what helps make us human and vulnerable). At other moments Doll is focused on the job task at hand: serving as a facilitator for her current charge as he hopefully begins to consider his mistakes, repents, and seeks and finds peace before death.

I felt a familiar, powerful truth being beamed into me by a vast, benificent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:

Comfort.

Comfort, for all else is futility.

But Boone is largely set upon whitewashing the past and reaffirming his own willful version of events in which he has been brave, inspiring in his ambition, and intent upon moving the world forward--and not, as others suggest, to blame for widespread manipulation, outright lies, and his own almost-singlehandedly driven environmental destruction of the earth and the lives upon it, possibly forever. He has moments of wavering guilt but then in full bluster talks himself around difficult issues and out of uncomfortable feelings around his actions and their significant consequences.

Boone's beloved daughter inserts doubt into his solid self-absolution, but when she is not present he takes up his convenient, delusional ways again.

As Doll enters into and drifts out of Boone's deathbed room, she reveals her own life in bits and pieces. She met an early, untimely, dramatic end, and we witness the first time that the supernatural version of Doll delves into what happened on earth in the aftermath of her accident. This was the most poignant aspect of the novel for me: a heartbreaking and maddening yet distantly comforting set of circumstances showing Doll how the world kept turning without her.

Issues around immense wrongdoing and forgiveness for wrongdoing, even if the forgiveness is not sought, seemed to promise complex explorations and nuances. But Saunders didn't delve deeply into the many possible weighty issues around fate, responsibility, repentance, and amnesty.

Saunders might have pursued this concept of unconditional forgiveness from God within Vigil. But there is a difference between blanket absolution and the idea that a human was always fated to do and become what he did and became, and Vigil has this teed up yet doesn't explore it.

Gradually he came to seem, if I may say it this way, inevitable.... Who else could he have been but who he was?

To consider, as Doll does--apparently as a directive from God--that Boone, a key figure in the destruction of the planet, might have been "inevitable" and thereby incapable of being or doing better (which in this case sets a particularly low bar) feels like a shocking, undeserved erasing of his decades of knowing, lie-filled, greedy pushing of his own agenda in order to be noticed and "succeed." The "inevitable" concept carried forward by Doll and, presumably, the others tasked with similar deathbed jobs, which apparently comes directly from God, seems to shrug shoulders about responsibility for self, for actions taken, and for resulting events.

This letting Boone off the hook with a simplistic Popeye-esque "I yam what I yam," "boys will be boys," "what was he gonna do, after all" felt particularly jarring in light of present-day, famously bullheaded mindsets that seem consider little else besides exerting power. This feels like a shocking blanket absolution for anyone taking actions that are harmful to individuals, whole groups, society, and the world at large. It feels facile and unproductive to support a small-minded shrugging-shoulders approach positing that a destructive, unthinking fool would be fated to do what he did and that he was incapable of other paths or of change and improvement.

Saunders offers a system of comfort provided by otherworldly angel creatures after their dying charges seek and find forgiveness. (When they do not genuinely seek clemency, horrors await, as we see ultimately with Boone.) But Vigil introduces many other complex questions (about the common earth, selfishness, advancement, preservation, change, safety, responsibility for future generations, not to mention theological questions), and this short (192-page) book didn't really dig into them.

I received a prepublication version of Vigil courtesy of NetGalley and Bloomsbury ANZ.

Please check out the reviews and lists on the blog if you're interested in books that address mortality.

Love for Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders is also the author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo as well as Tenth of December, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Fox 8, and other books. I included Lincoln in the Bardo in the Greedy Reading List Six Fascinating Historical Fiction Stories about the Civil War.