‘Vigil’ by Booker Prize winner George Saunders: A knock-off Pynchon without the punchline

From Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood to Barack Obama and the editors of Time magazine, it seems everyone who is anyone is lining up to sing the praises of George Saunders.

Saunders is the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a ghost story about the grief of Abraham Lincoln after losing his son, whose undead spirit becomes restless. The success of that novel has somewhat overshadowed the longer career of a talented writer who has written some of the best short fiction of the 21st century.

Does Saunders’ latest novel Vigil live up to the effusive praise? I think not.

Vigil’s narrator is Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spectral guide whose duty is to console dying individuals – her deathbed “charges” – as they pass through purgatory into the afterlife. She has overseen this rite of passage hundreds of times, ever since she was accidentally blown up by a criminal seeking revenge on her husband, a police officer.

Then she is tasked with consoling the comatose oil baron KJ Boone, who

“rolled right over whatever life put in front of him. He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as high as a guy could go. If he did say so himself. Hired and...

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