If Heaven, according to Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before — that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next.
Saunders set much of his magnificent 2017 debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, in the actual mausoleum and surrounding cemetery where in, February of 1862, Abraham Lincoln sat cradling the body of his 11-year-old son, Willie, who'd died of typhoid fever.
In Saunders' rendering, the Lincoln Pietà sits at the center of a crowd of Bardo dwellers: cracking crude jokes, demanding attention, exuding empathy, nastiness, indifference — in short, dead people behaving like exaggerated versions of their living selves. The enlightenment that some of these dead achieve is what the novel also delivered for many of us readers: a deepened sense, however momentary, of the mystery of Existence.
Vigil is a briefer and bumpier return visit back to the Bardo. Instead of the mythic grief of Lincoln, here we have the passing of one somewhat mundane, if contemptible, human being. K.J. Boone was — and for a few more hours, still is — an oil company CEO.
To Boone, corporate greed and fossil fuels power the engine of American capitalism — and he sees nothing wrong with the way things are. In fact, to keep profits soaring, he went so far as to falsify facts about scientific research. Think Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life for the Climate Change era.
Plummeting down into Boone's palatial bedroom from a more elevated spiritual realm is a woman named Jill "Doll" Blaine. ("Doll," was Jill's nickname before her sudden death in an explosion at 22.) In her role as spiritual facilitator, Jill has attended some 343 passings.
Jill's mission is to console those terrified by the transition from life to death; she also urges the dying to undertake a final review of their lives, but Boone isn't buying it. He sees nothing wrong with himself. As one of the many Bardo dwellers who visits Boone's deathbed says: "His long service to his colossal ego begins to undo him."
Vigil is a good, but not great short novel. Boone is just too much a stereotypical Captain of Industry to be the abiding center of interest here. That's why the novel comes alive halfway through when its focus turns to Jill, our flawed spiritual messenger.
A wedding taking place next door to Boone's house prompts Jill to recall her former life with such longing that she risks becoming stuck in the earthly realm. Here's a moment where Jill's grandmother (known as "Grandma Gust" because she frequently breaks wind) whisks her off to a cemetery to see some graves that may shock her out of her nostalgia. Also buried in the cemetery are Jill's parents. Jills says:
Seeing their graves was the hardest blow of all.
I used to come in from playing and there they’d be. They used to come in from being out somewhere and there I’d be, on the couch, maybe, and I’d jump up, so happy to see them.
Once there’d been no me and then they’d come along and made me and now I was gone and they were too.
What was the point of it all?
...
Grandma said. What keeps you here, doll?
What keeps you here? I said.
She leaned forward to answer, as about to tell me some long-kept secret.
Then did a little fart, like in the old days, so we might part on good terms.
That wild swirl of the bodily profane and the spiritual; the elegiac and the comical is what makes Saunders' writing so spectacular and thankfully, the sections where Jill takes center stage call it forth.
Of course, I feel a little regretful about saying anything negative about Saunders' work given that he's been elevated to secular sainthood ever since he gave that viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013 on the topic of kindness. Surely, the Bardo must be packed with critics struggling to let go of ego; atoning for negative and even mixed reviews like this one.
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