Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
It’s the language and telling that makes Vigil such a pleasure to read. While the subject is death and the act of dying, the prose is so alive with rhythmic inventiveness that it serves as a counterpoint to the miseries of dying and the wrenching recollections of past disappointments.
Saunders creates a version of a fantasy shared by many—the posthumous ability to see what is happening to the people we know and think about once we are gone. Beyond that, we are able to penetrate into the past and know what really happened in events that mystified us in life.
The narrator who possesses access to all this knowledge in the world of the novel is a woman who had once been Jill “Doll” Blaine, killed at twenty-two when a car bomb meant for her policeman husband, Lloyd, exploded. But now after death at the time of this telling she has become one of the elevated, a shifting presence like a transparent hologram, able to instantaneously transport for great distances and penetrate people and places, actually passing into the substance of another, as well as through layers of history, the stages of what had been,.
This elevated once-Jill is an eternal presence considered a creature of God. Her role, actually assignment, is to assist terminal humans with the transition to death, assuring that they are at peace with the life they have lived, atoning for faults and misdeeds. Her case in the novel is K.J. Boone, “a tiny, crimped fellow in an immense mahogany bed.” He had ascended from a hardscrabble birth to become CEO of a major petroleum company. A turning point of his actions in that position is a speech given in Aarhus promoting the dominance of industry, resulting in major world climate disasters that he refuses to acknowledge.
The existence of elevateds is hardly a group of angelic presences, as Jill encounters a Frenchman in Boone’s death room who seeks to dominate Jill in her task. She also meets other elevateds who are unpleasant. And disappointing.
The novel is filled with people alive and dead encountered by Jill, some she knew in her brief life, others strangers. She learns their stories, what they suffered, including victims of Boone’s climate abuse. These serve as examples of what humans undergo within theliving world.
One emerging complication for Jill, in addition to her struggle with Boone’s stubborn refusal to admit his failings, is the effects of her memories of being a young human, especially life with Lloyd and all their sexual pleasures. She comes to consider herself a divided being, neither fully human nor elevated: “Part of me was eternal and I had those considerable powers at hand (my mind was vast, unlimited, unrestrained, rapid, and skillful), while the other part, which very much longed to be alive again, was making me: desirous, ornery, active, aching to interfere in whatever way I could, in any old thing. Powerful combo.”
As Boone lies on the cusp of death, thousands of accusing spirits who had been victims of his anti-environmental policies refute his denial and “made the falseness of this statement [that he hadn’t known about climate studies] uncomfortable even to him.” He accepts that he has lied but dismisses its significance, believing he’ll be dead soon and free of his body. He thinks he is going to his dear God, who he believes had loved and protected him, and had made him one of the few people in history who had ever known his kind of power.
And in Boone’s final seconds of life the spirits of his father and mother tell him that he has made them proud and is bound for glory. His wife and daughter assure him that he did good. At this point, finally deceased, he ascends from his bed and joins the elevated around him. Once there he learns an eternal truth. Despite the praise of family, Jill reveals that it is too late. An inevitable harsh judgment is being passed.
At the end, this difficult case over, Jill—now seeking to become just her elevated self—realizes the inevitability of all that happens and that the one truth from a vast, beneficent God is that all is futility except giving comfort. That is the object of elevation.
I don’t feel guilty about revealing this ending because, for me, it’s not an unusual illumination, although some might consider it profound. For me, it’s the getting there that makes reading the novel worth it, the many narrative surprises along the way that sharpen Saunders’ realization of this ingenious reality.
