A book full of philosophical musings, corny antics and plaintive yearnings set down in lines as surprising and agile as deer ... With its concentration on the great final choice between deathbed redemption and eternal damnation, Vigil is a strikingly weird work of modern fiction. It seems instead to have risen up from the loamy soil of medieval allegory ... Saunders is wise to keep this short. It’s satisfying, of course, to see a billionaire world-wrecker sizzle on a bed of pain. But on the other hand, Boone risks feeling about as engaging as Hypocrisy ... Saunders uses the considerable rhetorical power of his prose to push this gracious idea that comfort is all we can offer ... Jill’s ethic is superficially lovely, but it’s also fundamentally disempowering and condescending.
Saunders’s fiction has begun to feel both darker and a bit frustrated, spiritually and artistically. You see the problem: What’s a satirist to do in times like these? ... May raise questions about how much empathy (or come-uppance) its villainous subject is owed. I’m agnostic on that, but I do think he should at least be interesting, and Boone is not ... Has no view of systems, no analysis of power ... I started imagining an alternative version in which the same raw materials...are assembled into something leaner, meaner, and more lively ... Not much of a character study. Nature or nurture, it’s hard to care where he ends up.
Breathtaking ... The novel is neither morbid nor morose. In fact, there is a great deal of well-meaning dark humor ... It’s a virtuoso achievement, an immersive experience for the reader.
Saunders’s new novel, Vigil, is slim, about the size of Mitch Albom’s memoir Tuesdays with Morrie or Richard Bach’s novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It’s not as soft and shallow and saccharine and strenuously earnest as those books, but it’s not impossibly far off. It’s a hot-water bottle in print form. It’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.
Suffers from the all-too-human foible of claiming high ideals while failing to actually abide by them ... I enjoyed every swift page of Vigil’s prose ... But I was taken aback by the malice of staging a deathbed inquisition that reduces the decedent, whatever his offenses, to cliché ... My disappointment in Vigil came down to the waste of a perfect setup for exhibiting the worldly redemption of art—that is, its power to redeem us from insensitivity and self-satisfaction.
Heady lyricism ... No wonder his fiction is so full of ghosts. It’s only when they get to the end of their story that they have the chance to figure out what it all means.
To say that I like George Saunders’ writing is a significant understatement ... So, it has been a source of great confusion, and even distress, to process my less-than-positive response to Saunders’ new novel, Vigil ... [A] section ends with some slapstick that is deliberately, comically juvenile, but it created, in me at least, a kind of tonal whiplash that I couldn’t quite shake ... One of the book’s themes is that judging others is easy, but understanding is hard, a theme infused in Saunders’ oeuvre over the years. But in this moment, in this story, I could not wholly abide it. I think some of this is in the uneven execution of the difficult problem Saunders gave himself with this book. But surely some of it is also found inside of me and my present view of the world that Saunders is trying to illuminate.
Feels like a short story that has been built up, mainly with flashbacks, into a brief and not altogether satisfying novel ... Both tedious and fanciful, mundane and flighty ... Saunders has done just enough fictional work to avoid the charge of polemicism, but his disgust at the secular sin of climate change denial has superseded his commitment to character and situation.
As he does in his short stories, in Vigil, Saunders exhibits that rare ability to make you laugh and blink back tears within the same paragraph, phrases so gracefully conceived you barely notice how you got from one emotion to another until you’re already there.
Verges at times on what Saunders would call a 'lecture' – twinkly and condescending but self-undermining too, its schematic clarity at odds with its belief in the mysterious and multivalent. Saunders’s use of canonical short stories as a source of inspiration – the basis, to some degree, of all of his best work – is hampered here by a curious blind spot. Chekhov wasn’t writing about the importance of rising above animus. He just did it.
Vigil is surprising. It is not, it turns out, a timid reprise of Lincoln in the Bardo so much as a reorientation of that novel’s rollicking supernatural mode towards a theme that has occupied Saunders for three decades in his short stories.
A mark of an effective writer is the ability to make a ubiquitous subject feel brand-new, and Saunders continues to illuminate the veil between realms in a tangible and arresting way ... The highest praise I can offer Vigil is to report how many of the novel’s core questions—Is Boone, and are we, 'inevitable occurrences?' When the consequences of our actions are un-rectifiable, what does that mean for us? How can we make peace after trauma, and which sacrifices are worth it? Is anything ever worth relinquishing our humanity?—resonate long after the final page turns.
Brilliant and confounding ... Vigil is a simply drawn, deeply complex fable of the delicate interconnection of life, human and otherwise, and the current myopia around and denial of that interconnection. It isn’t a novel about kindness or comfort; it’s a desperate, beautiful cri de coeur, essential reading as the fractured world teeters above the void.
A Christmas Carol for our times, targeting corporate greed, consumerism and climate change. Does it veer into preachy territory? Occasionally. But with Saunders in charge, blessedly, the laughs keep elbowing in.
Vigil is a superbly wrought bit of sentimental fantasy that shades gradually into something darker and more troubling. It’s a short book, smoothly readable, funny and self-consciously late.
Increasingly surreal ... The moral pressure can feel engineered: the symbolic volume turned up, the targets cleanly lit ... Vigil is entertaining, riotous even, full of procedural absurdity and metaphysical slapstick. But beneath the farce is a hard contemporary ache ... In the end, Vigil is both exhilarating and exhausting: a theatrical moral fable that sometimes shows its workings too plainly, but still carries a recognisably Saunders tenderness. You may admire it more than you love it. Yet its blunt question lands.
Intrigue thrums everywhere you look ... While there's a willed laboriousness to all this...the reader happily accepts it ... These are deep waters to cross in barely 200 pages ... Can lead the book into hazy sentimentality ... So entertaining on the page.
Saunders is nothing if not a humanist ... Difficult comfort sits at the center ... If Vigil has anything to tell us, it’s that there is no returning, neither to the past nor anywhere else ... It’s not that we are without agency, but that agency is a complex business.
As ever in Saunders, poignancy and farce are so wrapped up with one another that we don’t know whether to howl with laughter or with alarm ... Part of what makes Saunders such a daring and inventive original is that he gives us zany, even cartoonish beings who inadvertently become messengers for something sneakily profound ... I’ve never read anything like this before—except in Saunders’s earlier excursion into the Tibetan afterworld known as the Bardo. If I’m lucky, I’ll never forget it.
In Vigil, the spectral shenanigans are starting to feel like a gimmick: the polyphonic jibber-jabber, the Beckettian riddling, the poo and fart jokes (Saunders loves a bawdy, gassy ghost; a pile of phantom faeces). What once felt anarchic has hardened into habit; a repertoire of tricks and tics. They’re being used to stage a lesson for us – and it grates, to be trapped in someone else’s morality play.
Vibrant, fiendishly clever ... Saunders varies pointillist technique with staccato dialogue, slapstick humor, even touches of horror. It’s all thrilling on the page.
Despite the darkness and heaviness of what [he] write[s] about... Saunders can be moving, weird and funny ... Saunders is earnest without being saccharine, moral and political without being didactic or self-righteous, owing in part to the strange premises he adopts for his stories. As much is immediately evident in Vigil ... As with Ian McEwan’s books, it sometimes feels like Saunders is pandering to an assuredly adoring audience with his set-ups and themes, and yet, as happened to me with McEwan’s recent What We Can Know, with Vigil the strength of the storytelling overcame my resistance.
One of the most moving books you’ll read all year ... Saunders lets us know that even the smallest person can change not only our world, but the world to come, too.
In this purposeful, funny, and lacerating variation on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Saunders ponders suffering and repentance in a wily indictment of greed, greenwashing, and planetary devastation.
