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.