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.
Vigil is indeed a fantasy, set, like Saunders’s previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), in a world of spirits lingering on the edge of an obscurely ordered afterlife ... A fantasy not of justice or retribution but of the mere possibility of second thoughts ... At the lower end of Saunders’s range. It is brisk and charming, with that elegant, seemingly artless Saundersian way of stirring together wild metaphysical invention and slapstick mundanity, profanity and pathos and sudden stabs of horror. But much of it feels oddly out of focus.
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.
