An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future. With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

Vigil in many ways feels like a continuation of the storyworld Saunders developed in Lincoln on the Bardo, an unfortunate comparison given the previous novel was much stronger. Here, Saunders gives us the perspective of Jill Blaine, a spirit sent to console and guide other recently dead humans entering the afterlife. The strengths of the novel are generally around this protagonist. Saunders is a terrific writer and routinely creates beautiful passages, the best of which explore Blaine's own conflicts, wanting to be a help to others but constantly wrestling with being pulled back to her own time on Earth and the tragedy of her early death. Some aspects of the worldbuilding are terrific, notably the way the dead obsess over their old lives in a way that keeps them stuck and the vivid way Saunders paints that as a trap Blaine must avoid. However, Saunder's plot centers on Blaine trying to shepherd a fossil fuel capitalist ,Boone, and this is where the novel goes badly. We understood why Saunders needed a patient for Blaine that would challenge her and thus push her into her own psychological conflicts, but everything about Boone is just too obvious and blunt to be effective. The story falls into a catalog of climate horrors and corporate denials, none of which are interesting or surprising or frankly entertaining to read. It's an obviously relevant topic, but it lacks the innovation and magic of the rest of Saunder's universe. Because so much of the novel is Blaine dealing with Boone, the drag of this pedantic and flat critique of capitalism just pulls the rest of the novel down and it leads to a depressing conclusion whose message is quite bleak and disheartening. It's a shame because in Lincoln on the Bardo, Saunders used a similar spiritual vision to pull towards a powerful and very human story, one of painful loss and the possibility of healing. Here though, the anti-oil critique, as much as we agree with it, just sucked all the emotion from the story. Vigil is not a bad novel. If you really like Saunders and just want to spend more time in his pretty prose, this book will work for you. But NUBClub universally agreed that Saunders should have made this a short story and dropped all the political commentary, focusing on the interesting protagonist he created. Read Lincoln on the Bardo instead -- it's the better version of this story.