The Mourner's Bestiary

Finished on: 4/21/2026

 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

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Caffall had an uncle who kept a photo album full of friends who had died from HIV/AIDS, which he referred to as his “book of the dead.”

 

I think, ultimately, that’s what The Mourner’s Bestiary is too: Caffall’s own book of the dead, a tribute to family—father, grandparents, uncles and aunts—who died from kidney disease, a tribute and meditation on what they suffered, and a kind of reckoning with everything she herself lost to genetic kidney disease. It’s a memoir about her life with the disease, but in so many ways it feels like a tender eulogy.

 

Caffall’s prose is skillful, peppered with lovely passages, and there’s a confidence to her voice that can only come from a seasoned writer. That said, I found the conceit of the book—the way it continually pairs Caffall’s experiences with phenomena in the natural world—to be a bit forced. About halfway through the book, I found myself almost bracing for the sections that would force a metaphorical meaning from a marine biology fact, or extrapolate on a connection until it felt so stretched it could snap. I’m not conceptually opposed to this kind of structural conceit—I’ve seen this done masterfully in books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—but in The Mourner’s Bestiary it at times feels heavy-handed and clumsy rather than organically emerging from the events Caffall describes. I could feel Caffall pulling on the strings, so to speak, which took me out of the book sometimes. That’s why the 3.5 rating rather than a 4 or higher.

 

(Listen, I know all literature is artificial in the original sense of the word: it’s artifice, it’s craft, it’s in no way organic because it must necessarily be formed, structured, refined, etc. etc. It’s just that in my estimation, excellent writing makes you forget that reality—the artifice is so good you can mistake it for something naturally-occurring, y’know? My issue with The Mourner’s Bestiary is that I too often felt the artifice.) 

 

However, this book is definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in literary memoir, or reading firsthand accounts of life with chronic illness. Just prepare for some occasionally heavy-handed scaffolding around the lovelier parts.

Vigil

Finished on: 4/14/2026

 

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

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I’ve been a fan of George Saunders’ work since I first read his short story collection, Tenth of December, back in 2016. (I’ve had it in my “Forever Favorites” list on various book-tracking apps ever since.) After it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, I immediately sought out Saunders’ first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which then confirmed me as a true George Saunders fan. For the last decade, I’ve eagerly followed his career and read every book. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, deserves every accolade it has received. I won’t even start discussing the masterful craft evident in his 2020 short story “Love Letter"—which in my opinion is his best work of short fiction to date—or we’ll be here all day. I’ve always loved Saunders’ skill in balancing humor with emotional poignancy, brutality with grace, the mundane with the surreal. His writing style is rife with "wit-to-power,"  as Dwight Garner puts it, but that wit has always been grounded in real heart: in an evident love and respect for humanity, for everything we are, despite a clear-sighted understanding of our capacity for harm. I’ve always come away from a piece of George Saunders fiction with a sort of grimly hopeful awe at the human capacity to change, to shift gears, to reorient ourselves towards something better. 

 

 

So as you might expect, I went into Saunders’ newest novel, Vigil, with eager anticipation. 

 

 

To be blunt: I felt let down. 

 

 

While Vigil still has whiffs of classic Saunders—the surreal premise, the borderline slapstick humor lightening otherwise morbid scenes, the attention to interior character voice—the story feels anemic, incomplete. It flirts with hefty subjects like greed, free will, and atonement, but it says nothing substantive about them. The conclusion of the novel, in particular, feels hollow to me, a hurried and muddy ending to a book with little direction.

 

 

Vigil is the story of K.J. Boone, a wealthy 87-year-old oil tycoon dying of cancer, who, upon the night of his death, is visited by a spirit (or angel, perhaps) named Jill "Doll” Blaine. Jill is our point-of-view character, our guide through the story just as she is Boone’s guide and “comfort” as he lay dying. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boone is less than repentant for the harm he caused in life (an antithesis to Dickens’ Scrooge), and the entire novel is Jill grappling with this. 

 

 

But here’s my problem: Jill grapples to no purpose. Because while the story gestures at interesting themes around human selfishness and mortality, determinism and free will, they are ultimately empty gestures that lead nowhere. Jill begins the novel believing that circumstances shape (determine) who we are, and she still believes that by its ending. The novel begins with Jill attempting to comfort one dying life, and it ends the same way. There’s no movement toward any denouement, no sense of turning or of change. The story remains one flat line from start to finish. Even Boone’s eventual death—the only scene that arguably resembles a change or turning point—is narratively de-fanged, treated as meaningless, or at best impotent. The story ends in precisely the same place it began, and I was left with the feeling that this 175-page novel had nothing much to say. 

 

 

Where George Saunders’ older work has heart and movement, Vigil is a shrug, a half-finished gesture. I’d hoped for more from a writer who’s consistently shown better skill than this.

The Brothers Karamazov

 

Finished on: 3/29/2026 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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The Brothers Karamazov can arguably be summarized in this line from W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939":

 

"We must love one another or die."

 

The Brothers Karamazov—part murder mystery, part treatise on the crisis faced by the human soul under threat from "the scandal of evil"—is fundamentally a novel about what happens when people fail to love each other. It's about brotherly love in the broad, traditionally Christian sense of that term, embodied in the three Karamazov brothers. It's through the brothers that the novel's central preoccupation becomes clear: "What does the world look like when no one is his brother's keeper?" Over the course of the novel, we see this question play out in intricate detail in both the Karamazov family and also in the larger community of Skotoprigonyevsk. We see what Sharon Cohen calls the "breakdown in communal responsibility" ("Balaam's Ass," p. 2) towards vulnerable characters like Stinking Lizaveta and Smerdyakov, and Dostoevsky takes great pains to show the ripple effects of such communal breakdowns—or breakdowns in brotherly love. Those ripples ultimately create the central conflict of the novel, which leads to the ruin of two Karamazov brothers. The reader sees again and again the moral and spiritual wounds both sustained and inflicted by characters who refuse to be responsible for one another.

 

Dostoevsky makes clear his interest in human nature, on both the individual and communal level. None of the characters in this novel feel flat—they are all utterly, deeply human, and the reader becomes privy to their hopes, their temptations, their inconstancy, their fears, etc. They are complexly textured and layered, and Dostoevsky puts them through their paces. Michael Katz points out in the afterword of this edition that in Dostoevsky's Literary Notebook, in reference to Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote, "And so I believe in Christ and confess Him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through a vast furnace of doubt." The characters in The Brothers Karamazov also pass through this furnace of doubt, and it's in the furnace that we meet them. 

 

It's the intimate, granular details of the characters and their relationships that fuel the novel's story. This makes for a slow pace as Dostoevsky establishes the intricacies of each character, and I'll admit to wondering—especially towards the middle of the novel—whether there'd be any "pay off" to all the detail, all the seemingly inconsequential conversations in parlors and village streets. I found the characters interesting, but hoped for more than a handful of interesting character sketches before the end of the novel. My attention and reading stamina occasionally flagged when I doubted the arrival of any pay off. But! The end of the novel (specifically, Book Eleven) delivers what I'd been hoping for, and in fact made me want to revisit all those small, granular moments again to better appreciate how seamlessly they built towards the denouement. Book Eleven, in my opinion, coalesces the individual character portraits into an artistic, masterful theme. The 600+ pages it took to get there felt worth it. 

 

All of which to say: I think this novel rewards the effort to read it, but go into it with the right expectations. It is slow, and meticulous, and fundamentally preoccupied with themes of depravity, redemption, and the absolute necessity of love.