While reading George Saunders’ short novel Vigil, I had dark thoughts. A story of an angel visiting a dying man and helping him go through his life, one stubborn fragment after another, made me feel as if I was dying and being forced to face one dark memory after another. I called up a friend who has read Saunders; he said that the collection Tenth of December was also dark. Neither of us had read Saunders’ Booker Prize–winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. By now, it seems unlikely. This is because, for all of Saunders’ mastery, Vigil reminded me of what I dislike the most about modern American fiction: it is boring, navel-gazing, and self-serious.

The angel visiting her “charge”—an oil tycoon literally on his deathbed at his “lovely” home in Texas—is the ghost of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a 22-year-old former phone operator and waitress, a likeable woman who died in an explosion meant to kill her husband. She is even dressed like a doll, her thoughts are soothing, and her task is to comfort the dying.

K.J. Boone, the oil tycoon, has lived to his late 80s in a life of willful destruction of the earth. His company, one of the world’s biggest, ordered a climate change study and found what 17,000 scientists were already saying: fossil fuels are raising the planet’s temperature. Instead of releasing the study, Boone quietly raised the height of his offshore oil rigs, to continue pumping while the oceans rose.

Before I finished Vigil, I was under the impression that this evil man was its protagonist. But I was wrong: the narrative begins and ends with his decidedly better angel. Saunders is a clever and accomplished craftsman. To underline that Boone is no anti-hero, he does not make Boone undergo any profound realisation or change, even on his deathbed. Instead, it is Jill whose character arc gathers epiphanies and conclusions about the nature of life and the limits of human agency.

The novel comprises compact sentences filled with vivid details, like lines of poetry: a father’s back pocket contains a chaw tobacco tin; a backyard is littered with “a rimless tire, a rusted length of dog chain, the naked brim of a baseball cap, the pink arm and head of Minky, the beloved doll of his sister Willamina”; “oily smoke from the contraption poured forth from the barn, drifting over a nearby meadow lush with wildflowers”, and so on. Saunders can craft his sentences, and it is no surprise that he teaches at Syracuse University.

What may attract some and put off others is the novel’s abstraction. The narrative is not linear, perhaps because an angel’s narrative is not and neither is the self-evaluation of a dying man. Memory is simply not linear, despite our best efforts.

The planet is dying

Thus, you are dropped into the story, as if from a height, with increasing speed as you hit the ground. In Vigil, this is literally true; in its opening lines, Jill falls from the sky onto Boone’s front yard—no introduction, no explanation. In its final lines, she falls from the sky into a different dying charge’s house. The reader, however, does not lose patience even while this abstraction smoothens out, with emphasis on feeling rather than facts.

In between, many ghosts visit Boone for the last time, ushered in and shepherded out by Jill. His wife is a mainstay, ministering to him in his last moments; his daughter, despite her grudges, is sweetness personified.

As for Jill herself, she never discovers why she was mistakenly killed. Instead, she finds that both her husband and her killer have continued to live full and satisfying lives long after she is gone. It is an inexplicable turn of fate that does not trouble her inordinately. No wonder she is an angel. Boone, on the other hand, repeatedly pushes back against any self-awareness. After all, he had a humble beginning in rural Wyoming, where he was an unusually short kid bossed around by other schoolchildren. From there he ended up leading one of the biggest oil companies in the world. He has no use for self-awareness.

Still, the planet is dying thanks to Boone (and his ilk), and Vigil takes us on an excursion of the disaster of climate change that, frankly, someone living in north India with its hellish summers and gas-chamber winters is already familiar with. (Ian McEwan did a superior job with his recent What We Can Know, describing a future where global warming has turned England into a dangerous archipelago.)

One ghost visiting Boone is Mr Bhuti of Haryana where, we are told, the valleys have flooded. I live in Haryana; there are no valleys here, just the Aravallis that have been almost flattened by mining. Another ghost who shows up repeatedly, like Betaal, is a Frenchman who tries to force our empathetic angel to show Boone the horrors he has wreaked on the planet. Boone acknowledges his actions but refuses to acknowledge his culpability. After all, as the angel discovers, each person is an “inevitable occurrence”, and therefore, it is “ludicrous” to pass judgment. She concludes: “Who else could he have been but who he was?”

It is a dense, well-written book. However, is it worth your time and energy, especially when there is so much else out there to read, both past and forthcoming? I doubt it.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living in the outskirts of Delhi.

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