“Who else could you have been but exactly who you are? I said. Did you, in the womb, construct yourself? All your life you believe yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely diminished in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”
The master of satire is back with "Vigil," which attempts to balance hilarity and accountability to mixed results. George Saunders offers up shades of "Lincoln in the Bardo," peopling his afterlife with an eclectic cast of characters charged with consoling and eliciting atonement from the dying.
K.J. Boone is the latter, an oil magnate who led the effort to cover up the environmental destruction wrought by his industry. His liaison to the afterlife, Jill, grows frustrated in her efforts to elicit any measure of apology or recognition of his sins from Boone.
“ … only the two original Mels remained, wincing somewhat at the discomfort associated with the ongoing, continual rear reentry of their miniature selves.”
I'm an avid reader of Saunders's -- see "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," "Fox 8," "Liberation Day," and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," in addition to "Lincoln in the Bardo" -- and appreciated this one, but would not count it among my favorites of the author's.
“Grandma Gust, we’d called her. Because of her late-life farting. She’d been the first to call herself that. After ripping one at dinner. And then we all picked up on it.”
"Vigil" is at is best when the focus is on Jill, who must reckon with her own mysteries in the wake of her sudden death. Saunders packs a lot into a fast-paced, short novel, leading a reader to wonder whether it would have benefited from more or less space to roam.
“What keeps you here, I said.
“She leaned forward to answer, as if about to tell me some long-kept secret.
“Then did a little fart, like in the old days, so we might part on good terms.
“And off she went.”
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