“At this point in my life, ‘comfort’ comes from anyone who speeds me toward more truth,” Saunders told the Globe.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
In George Saunders’s recently released second novel, Vigil, the ghost of a woman named Jill (Doll) Blaine, a young woman departed decades earlier, is tasked with comforting oil and gas baron K.J. Boone as he’s fading away on his deathbed. Boone traces the circumstances of his life in the theatre of his mind; he has done objectively catastrophic things, but through self-deception or gymnastic justifications, feels no need to take any responsibility for them or outright denies the consequences of his actions. Psychically, he appears at peace – Jill scans his mind and finds no doubts or regrets – though eventually, through a number of efforts, cracks start to appear in his wall of certitude.
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The most aggressive of those efforts come from another, French-speaking shade who quickly appears on the scene and asks for some time with the weakening tycoon. Evidently the second ghost, Étienne Lenoir, the Belgian-French inventor of the internal combustion engine (though he’s never named), is adamant Boone must atone for sins against nature. With increasing wildness and exasperation, he tries to bring Boone out of self-deception to a place where he would require Jill’s comfort.
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Thus begins a roller coaster of self-reflection, self-mythologizing, unsettling truths and hostile attempts to justify heinous and irreversible damage. In short, an amplified version of the ego-preserving mental exercises that nearly all human beings, at some point in their lives, engage in.
It’s fertile ground for exploring what became Saunders’s central question as he wrote the book: “What is comfort, anyway?”
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Reached via e-mail on the eve of Vigil‘s book tour in late January, Saunders notes that as he revised the novel, “it soon became clear that her definition of comfort might be a little wonky and avoidant – true, I think, in the absolute and philosophical sense, but also (for all her good intentions) with a touch of what we Buddhists call ‘idiot compassion.’”
“At this point in my life, ‘comfort’ comes from anyone who speeds me toward more truth,” Saunders continues. “I think that once we acknowledge a situation, there’s always something to do – if only to endure it in a position of non-denial. (“It sounds like there are wolves outside this cabin. Yes, yes, there are. Well, okay: Now what?”). That ‘now what’ is a strong position, I think, as opposed to, you know, ‘What wolves?’”
In everyday, monkey-brain life, it’s no small feat to speed toward truth. It requires a holistic, clear-eyed perspective on the situation at hand, which requires a good amount of time and a very specific type of energy. Usually, because none of us live in a vacuum, it’s necessary to make an earnest attempt to understand the perspective of others, too.
It’s also part of a typical day in the life of a working fiction writer. At least in his novels and short stories, Saunders is a master of this exercise in compassion, imagining the world with great verve and specificity through the eyes of another. Often the characters with which he undergoes the examining merit sympathy effortlessly, like the grieving Abraham Lincoln in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) or any number of the clueless theme park actors, middle-aged office workers, or humans freakishly enslaved as entertainment consoles that appear in his short-story collection Liberation Day (2022).
Boone is a much harder pill to swallow, which winds up raising, perhaps, more difficult questions in a reader: If this villain does indeed wind up seeking redemption, does he deserve it? If I, myself, in the twilight of my life, were faced with irrefutable evidence that I caused great suffering, could I face it in a position of non-denial?
But Saunders resists the popular justification that reading or writing fiction necessarily makes a person more empathetic. A few minutes thinking is enough to remember there are also plenty of jerks who read and write a lot of fiction. Plus: “What if some authoritarian government says, ‘Yes, we agree, art should be good for you,’ and then, deciding that your art isn’t good, by their definition, puts you in the gulag?” he writes. As Zadie Smith notes in her 2020 book of essays Intimations, the realest answer to “why write?” is: "It’s something to do."
“At my deepest level, when someone asks me what art is good for, I feel like saying, ‘Maybe nothing. Let’s find out what this particular work of art does,’” Saunders writes.
But it’s also true that Vigil‘s electric, poignant experiments in compassionate thought nudge readers toward cultivating a certain type of attention-paying. The novel’s most moving moment is perhaps Jill’s process of coming to terms with the inevitability of one of the most important people in her own story. In seeking to perceive all the circumstances that led to him, she’s able to connect with something elevated – “Universal mind? The subconscious?” Saunders wonders – that operates above her regular old Jill (Doll) Blaine mind. As she’s sped toward truth, she finds a type of comfort.
“Speaking as a reader, I really love the feeling of my mind ascending up into that non-habitual state and finding another mind there – someone distant, maybe, in time and space, and yet … there he or she is, affirming that, for all our differences, there’s something in common about the way the world is feeling to us,” Saunders writes.