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.

Orbital

Finished on: 12/18/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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Samantha Harvey said in an interview that she wanted to write a "space pastoral," and Orbital is the fruit of that effort. I think Harvey not only succeeded in her goal, but also wrote a moving love letter to Earth and to humanity. 

 

The experience I had reading this novel was sort of like standing before a painting—maybe Pollock's Shimmering Substance, or van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône—and falling into its colors, its shadings, its intimations of movement across the canvas. This novel revels in descriptive imagery, in capturing the light and colors and textures of a rotating Earth as seen from 250 miles above it. As part of her research, Harvey watched hours of NASA footage from the International Space Station, which is evident in how well she evokes the astronauts' view through the space station's windows. 

 

And while Orbital beautifully describes planetary movements and the shimmering spread of galaxies, I found myself most engaged by its tender attention to the human beings aboard the space station. The readers become privy to the ordinary habits, conversations, and inner thoughts of these six astronauts, and these passages were my favorites of the book. I love that Harvey honors the everyday human concerns—how do you sleep in space? eat? pee? work your muscles?—that shape daily experience (and thus our lives). I love how the astronaut's everyday concerns effortlessly flow into meditations on the nature of time, human ambition, and our place in the universe. 

 

Readers get to see the astronaut's complex feelings about being in space, how they both long for and dread returning home, how their vantage point from space has re-contextualized their understanding of their own lives on Earth. For instance, we see the Japanese astronaut, Chie, receive news that her mother passed away while Chie is in orbit. We see her struggle with grief that feels displaced—literally at a remove from its rightful place, there, down on Earth—and yet her attempts to situate her grief, to make sense of it, are so easily recognizable to any of us. The environment in which it occurs may feel alien, but that ancient human impulse is intimately familiar. The novel consistently threads this needle with other characters, too, and it's a joy to read. 

 

This is not a story-driven novel, nor is it even an especially character-driven novel (despite how good the character vignettes are): it's a novel about place. It's a novel about human belonging to Earth, and our simultaneous yearning to pass beyond Earth's boundaries. Its sustained attention to imagery asks us to do what great paintings also ask us to do: fall into the colors and lighting and textures and see where we land.

 

It feels appropriate to end on these passages from the novel: 

 

"When he's seen through a telescopic lens the flowlines made by ships pulling at the ocean, or the ancient shorelines of Bolivia's bright orange Laguna Colorada, or the red sulphur-stained tip of an erupting volcano, or the wind-cut folds of rock in the Kavir Desert, each sight has come to him as a winching open of the heart, a crack at a time. He'd not known how capacious it was, the heart. Nor how in love he could be with a ball of rock; it keeps him awake at night, the vitality of this love.

 

[...] So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experiment in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It's going to end. And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavour that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still."