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 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.
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.
