Tag: George Saunders

Vigil by George Saunders – Book

Vigil by George Saunders is full of death and ghosts, at least these eternal figures, many continuing to inhabit the site of their death and only able to see others who have died, seem to be ghosts. Some ghosts can travel, can “refresh” themselves. If they agree to perform a task assigned by God and become “elevated” they have many powers, but they must give up who they were in life. 

Jill ‘Doll” Blaine is elevated, and she has been assigned the task of comforting people just before they die. She has comforted almost 340 people, but K. J. Boone looks to be the most difficult assignment she has had. Plus, she is suddenly wondering whether she wants to be elevated or not because she misses being Jill. Other ghosts who are not elevated remember their lives. She was very young when she got blown up by accident (when she turned the key in her husband’s car).

Of course, the whole ghost thing is just a conceit for some high-level philosophical thinking. K. J. Boone rose from humble beginnings to become a wealthy and powerful man. He and his wife Vivian, daughter Julie, traveled extensively when he became the owner of a large gas and oil company. It took skills to locate the best places to find oil and gas, to arrange to have it brought to the surface, and to refine and deliver it. Of course, he knew that people came to believe that pollution from burning fossil fuels was harming life on the planet. But he believed that oil and gas offered the best energy sources and that not using these fuels would cost him and his rivals profits. So what if he faked some science to convince the peons that burning fossil fuels had nothing to do with climate change and that men were too puny to affect nature on such a grand scale.

Now he lay dying and here was this young lady, this nobody, in her pink blouse, beige skirt and black shoes trying to get him to admit that he has been selfish, greedy, and mean, and that he had hurt the earth and everyone on it with his lies. Then there was that pesky Frenchman, the one who invented the engine that jump-started the Industrial Revolution, who kept popping in and out of his bedroom, who also wanted him to confess and admit that he was wrong to have inverted the scientific method. The ‘Mel’s came and went, toadies and rivals, long dead, who kept spawning new ‘Mel’s in unconventional ways. 

There was a wedding going on next door in this upscale neighborhood and when the stench of the dying man’s sins became too great Jill would observe the party or even mingle unseen with the guests. This is how she became homesick for simple things she had enjoyed like lipstick. This is how she started to wonder if she had made the right choice to be elevated. This is when she begins to see that perhaps how people turn out is inevitable because of their birth and the events in their life. The world was certainly declining from its former beauty and the weather offered little certainly that houses would stand or there would be enough to eat. But what good did it do to try to get Mr. Boone to change his mind as he lay dying? 

Plenty to think about in Vigil by George Saunders. (I did not realize that we reside in the same city, just a side observation.) Did I like the book as well as Lincoln in the Bardo? That story was so poignant, and so clever with all the ‘ibids’ and ‘opcit’s. We feel no grief for the dying K. J. Boone. We may feel some for Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, but that’s not the point of the story. Perhaps placing blame for climate change is not important unless we can change the minds of powerful people who are living and can still do something about saving the tiny planet where we all live. 

NB 

My cousin William (Bill) Goodenough, now deceased, wrote a book that offered fake evidence intended to disprove climate change, so I was well prepared for Boone’s backwards science. (The Three Concepts of Climate Change: Is AGW Politics or Science?) If you begin with your conclusions (although you call these statements your hypotheses) and then set out to collect evidence that backs up your conclusions and ignores evidence that negates your conclusions, that is cheating. That isn’t science at all. It’s propaganda.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – Book

 

In a book peopled by many ghosts and few living people George Saunders writes a thoughtful book that reminds me of one of those black and white photographs with only one spot of color. Perhaps a splash of bright red or saffron yellow.

Abe Lincoln (and Mary Todd Lincoln) lost their son Willie Lincoln in 1862, probably from typhoid fever. Willie was eleven. The Lincoln’s had planned a grand party to show off the new White House décor. No expense was spared and hundreds of important people had been invited. In such a situation, do you go ahead and have the party with your little son so sick upstairs? If you are the President you must and you do, even though you know some people will think you made the wrong choice. Given that the Civil War had already begun, people’s reactions to the party were bound to be emotional even if guests did not know about the illness of Lincoln’s son.

Thus begins Lincoln in the Bardo, the first full length novel by George Saunders. On the night of the party we are introduced to one of the unusual literary devices used in this amazing book, a book that breaks new ground for fiction. The author begins quoting from some of the many Lincoln books. Each quote describes the sky on the night of the party. The descriptions are not at all consistent. Some describe a clear night with a brilliant moon. Others say the night sky was cloudy and there was no moon. Some actually recall that it was a stormy night.

The narrator uses actual quotes and avoids footnotes by telling the source, title and author as part of the story. If an author is quoted again, we get a name and an “op cit”. There are a lot of “op cit-s” in this novel, adding a sense of authenticity. You might worry that this would be deadly as a device in a novel, but somehow it isn’t, and that is part of the genius of this unusual book.

Willie Lincoln, history tells us, does not recover. He dies so young. His father is distraught.

But what is “the Bardo”? The internet tells me that in some forms of Buddhism this describes an existence between life and death. Saunders puts quite a Christian spin on this, almost like purgatory. Once Willie is laid to rest in a crypt at the cemetery his little body/soul comes forth to join the many other souls who are clinging to what they know (as much as the sort of half-life in that place bears any similarity to real life) because their human failings make them afraid to “go on”.

The Bardo is full of souls, of all classes, and all genders, all ages, and many professions. Many alliances are formed in the Bardo. Three souls in particular are our guides to the Bardo in this particular cemetery. But there are no children here. Children usually “go on” right away. However, Lincoln and Willie are so fond of each other that Willie cannot bring himself to go, and Lincoln cannot bring himself to let go.

Do souls in limbo have feelings? Is there still some sense of good and bad in the Bardo? The shades are genuinely worried about the fact that Willie is staying for his father’s sake. Bad things happen to children who stay in the Bardo. What duty do the shades take on and how does that work out? The reader gets to think long and hard about the nature of death and the after effects of decisions we make in our lives, although the denizens of the Bardo never use any words that might make death seem real. We also get to think about what might have happened if Lincoln had given in to his grief and had been unable to govern well in the critical situation of that moment in time.

I listened to the book on Audible, read by an enormous cast of some pretty well known people. This made the Bardo “come alive”. (Sorry for the double meaning.) I have to caution that not everyone in the Bardo is “quite the thing” so some of the language and the deeds get too inappropriate for children, the folks at the gym, or the neighbors to hear, especially out of context. Headphones might be a good option.

This is a unique book offering several more breaks from “life” in the Bardo to quote from the abundant Lincoln literature with plenty of “op cit-s”. If you sometimes give up on fiction because it seems there may be no new stories to tell or no new ways to tell stories, George Saunders’ book Lincoln in the Bardo will make you question that notion. Saunders book is poignant and profound; thoughtful and thought-provoking.

This site gives a list of characters and also a list of the cast on the Audible version of this book.

http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/lincolninthebardo