"Vigil" | Reviewed by William Winkler

American author George Saunders, after earning a degree in Geophysical Engineering, worked a series of technical jobs until he entered the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. In1997 he was appointed to the Syracuse faculty, where he has taught until the present day.

Saunders’s first novel, 2017’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel is set in the Bardo, a Buddhist concept of the status of the soul between death and reincarnation.

Saunders continues the theme of magical realism in his recent novel, “Vigil.” The novel’s protagonist, Jill “Doll” Blaine, has been sent from her post in the afterlife to comfort her “charge,” as she calls him, during his transition from life to death.

She has performed this task on more than 300 previous occasions since her death in the 1970s. Virtually all of her “charges” have regarded her services with gratitude, but not K.J. Boone. An oil company executive, Boone single-handedly forged the attitude that fossil fuels were the only legitimate source of energy for an economically expanding world, all contrary evidence be damned. He looked back on his life as one of exemplary accomplishments, with no causes for regret or self-doubt.

Blaine’s attempts to ease the oilman’s passage from his world to hers are met with rebuff after rebuff, even as a parade of characters from Boone’s career remind him of their perception of his shortcomings. He is only convinced of his culpability at the very instant his soul departs, and he insists he now knows how to set things right, that only he is capable of doing so.

“Vigil” is a powerful novel dealing with immortality, guilt, self-delusion, and enlightenment. Briskly written, it will turn the reader onto a path of inward examination and consideration of ultimate consequences.

Buy the book.