Our Take

George Saunders has always been drawn to the moment when ordinary decency collides with systemic cruelty, and Vigil stages that collision at its most extreme: a man whose life was built on extraction, facing the accumulated weight of everything he displaced and destroyed, and declining to feel bad about any of it. It's a setup that could easily turn didactic, but Saunders is too canny and too strange for that. The novel's supernatural scaffolding — birds, calves, materialized strangers, oil cronies with post-mortem schemes — keeps the tone careening between the comic and the grave, which is precisely where Saunders does his best work. Lincoln in the Bardo readers will recognize the formal restlessness and the emotional ambition; this is a slimmer, more concentrated book, but no less expansive in what it's reaching for. The figure of Doll — a guide who has ushered 343 souls through this passage and never encountered one quite like Boone — gives the novel its emotional spine, and the question of whether she can reach him gives it genuine stakes. Readers who love Kevin Wilson's Nothing to See Here or the work of Kelly Link will appreciate the precise strangeness of Saunders's imagination. For anyone who has ever wondered what accountability looks like when the powerful simply refuse it, this is the novel.