A knock-off Pynchon without the punchline: George Saunders’ Vigil falls flat

From Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood to Barack Obama and the editors of Time magazine, it seems everyone who is anyone is lining up to sing the praises of George Saunders.

Saunders is the author of Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a ghost story about the grief of Abraham Lincoln after losing his son, whose undead spirit becomes restless. The success of that novel has somewhat overshadowed the longer career of a talented writer who has written some of the best short fiction of the 21st century.

Does Saunders’ latest novel Vigil live up to the effusive praise? I think not.

Review: Vigil – George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

Vigil’s narrator is Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spectral guide whose duty is to console dying individuals – her deathbed “charges” – as they pass through purgatory into the afterlife. She has overseen this rite of passage hundreds of times, ever since she was accidentally blown up by a criminal seeking revenge on her husband, a police officer.

Then she is tasked with consoling the comatose oil baron K.J. Boone, who

rolled right over whatever life put in front of him. He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as high as a guy could go. If he did say so himself. Hired and fired, restructured whole divisions, traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.

Boone remains cold, proud and unrepentant about the craterous ecological footprint his business dealings have left on the world, even in his final hours on earth.

To Jill’s surprise, she is joined in her task by a spectral colleague – a Frenchman seeking redemption for his part in the climate catastrophe, having invented the combustion engine. The Frenchman has taken it upon himself to force Boone to atone. He tries to impress upon Boone the gravity of his complicity, as the CEO of an oil corporation, with the catastrophe of climate change.

None of the Frenchman’s attempts have any effect. Boone maintains global warming is a fiction and nothing can convince him otherwise. He is unmoved by visits from the apparitions the Frenchman conjures in a vain attempt to rattle him: his family members, friends and colleagues; the people, animals and natural features his business ventures have obliterated or destroyed. His devotion to oil and Mammon reigns supreme.

This troublesome case raises personal dilemmas for Jill. She is led to reflect on her former life, her view of things, her idealised relationship with her husband (who, it turns out, moved on too soon) and her murderer, who was never brought to justice. As she grapples with her difficult situation, she increasingly detours into questions of mortality and how to find the peace that comes with acceptance, even when there has been no justice.

At last, Jill sacrifices her professional impartiality to defeat and banish Boone’s lackeys, the two “Mels”, who have been waiting for him in purgatory, with the aim of reinstating him as the figurehead for their capitalist propaganda. In doing so, Jill unexpectedly saves Boone’s soul. She makes him realise that he must join with the Frenchman and use his time in purgatory to convince others that we can change course from petrocapitalism to renewable energy.

Jill realises this is merely a symbolic gesture; there are no single villains in the story of capitalism. Many despicable hands are at work, ghost-like, behind the scenes. The CEOs are merely symbolic figureheads. Behind them are other ordinary disciples spreading the gospel of capital: a lineup of Mels, wreaking havoc. Boone’s odious daughter, for example, defends her father by accusing leftists of being hypocrites because they drive to work and tweet their critiques of capitalism on the latest iPhone, as if simply opting out of capitalism were possible without there being a revolution in the mode of production.

Monstrous magnates

I wanted to like Vigil more than I did. The premise is timely. There are moments of humour and wildly imaginative surrealist play that feel fresh and excuse some of the hackneyed dialogue, sentimentality and moralising.

But for a novel that wants to address the perils of late capitalism and encourage the reader to imagine alternatives to the climate apocalypse we are hurtling towards, Vigil shies away from elaborating the issues. It relies heavily on insinuation. Boone’s crimes against humanity remain indistinct and unconvincing. Whether or not one agrees with the the novel’s spiritual premise, its discussion of petrocapitalism and climate catastrophe is woefully vague, even artificial and trite, in the pages where it ought to feel most acute.

The novel is bereft of the kind of background investigations that might produce genuine insights into the crises we are living through, and which make other great works of the genre – Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1911), Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), E.L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake (1980) – so memorable and worth rereading in these times.

Boone is a character we are supposed to find enigmatic, manipulative and complex. But his background story feels underdeveloped and hackneyed. It is told piecemeal, in snippets of memories resembling a pastiche of Citizen Kane and Ebenezer Scrooge.

This is among the more compelling testaments to his power:

So they turned to him, trusted him, feared him, even. Only a handful of people in all of history had ever known that kind of power. Presidents, maybe, depending on the era; kings, sure, but their kingdoms were not worldwide; movie stars and such, but that was all superficial crap. He spoke and markets moved; called a king and the king picked up. He’d decided we were sticking with oil and, goddamn it, we’d stuck with oil and the world got twenty, thirty good years in exchange. […] You’re welcome, world.

Still, it falls flat. I found myself comparing Boone to other tycoons from well-known American novels. He pales in comparison to the heaven-and-earth-moving avarice of the union-busting petrocapitalist J. Arnold Ross in Sinclair’s Oil! and Daniel Day Lewis’ menacing reinterpretation of him as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s loosely adapted film There Will Be Blood (2007). Nor does Boone demonstrate the cunning and brilliance of Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (based on streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes) or Doctorow’s F.W. Bennett.

In a tradition of Cowperwoods, Bennetts and Rosses, Boone feels about as convincing a villain as Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, without the wit. It is a particular disappointment, given the abundance of material to work with at a time when there are more vile billionaire CEOs populating our world than at any other point in history.

The unconvincing quality is not simply because Vigil is not a realist novel. Compare Boone to Pierce Inverarity, the dead millionaire in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and he still comes up short, despite the fact we never even meet Inverarity – he is the villain pulling the strings from beyond the grave. Indeed, Vigil feels at times like a knock-off Pynchon novel without the punchline. Jill resembles Pynchon’s bewildered housewife protagonist Oedipa Maas, who must reckon with the restless spirit of Inverarity, another dead CEO who seems to be communicating with and manipulating her.

The dialogue and style of narration are heavy-handed in places. The characters are mostly threadbare and uninteresting, and the frequent entering into different characters’ streams of consciousness often leaves the reader with vertigo. The storyline is busy, but the narrative energy feels forced, lacking the spontaneous energy that emanates from Pynchon’s unambiguous political sincerity, which thrums beneath his verbal silliness and hijinks.

It is as if Saunders hasn’t fully decided or committed to exactly what he wants to say about the material, or how best to go about saying it. Over and over, he misses opportunities to accept the challenge of all speculative novels: to explore not only the limits but the possibilities of utopian thinking. An example is when Boone raises the compelling question of what would happen to civilisation if oil were taken out of the equation.

The ending is disappointingly hollow and deflating, encapsulated in Jill’s evasive epiphany: “Comfort, for all else is futility.” But the deepest disappointment is that Vigil fails to deliver on its promises to follow through on its ambitious political polemics. Others will have to read and decide from themselves, but in a time of rising corporate-sponsored fascism, ecoterrorism, oil-driven land grabs and warfare, the billionaire Boone’s redemption arc feels outdated, defeatist and tone deaf.

Should Vigil really be marketed as a “triumph” for how boldly it reckons with today’s biggest issues? The political commentary in Vigil remains as hollowed out as the ghosts that populate its pages; its attempts to imagine alternatives to the present stall. The political struggles that define our times are instead diluted into a self-defeating moral parable about making peace with ourselves by accepting people and situations as they are.

Tamlyn Avery receives funding from the Australian Research Council.