George Saunders Brings Morality Back to Fiction
It was once commonly understood that fiction was in the wisdom business, that it offered not only aesthetic pleasure but also moral improvement. This function of literature was not tough to spot. One of the first English novels was Samuel Richardson’s 1740 work, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded—a title not meant ironically. Through the 19th century, many authors turned directly to the reader with philosophical and social (if sometimes ironic) commentary: “It is a truth universally acknowledged”; “It was the best of times”; “All happy families are alike.” For readers not up to the challenge of full George Eliot novels, her enterprising publisher compiled a volume of Eliot’s many Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in order to more broadly distribute “a morality as pure as it is impassioned.”
Such open authorial musing, and maybe literature’s wisdom-seeking function itself, has been out of vogue during the past century of show-don’t-tell storytelling. Although this has surely spared us some clunky sermonizing, it has brought downsides as well. Too many writers seem to have overlooked what I consider to be a key piece of the mission. I can’t tell you how many novels I’ve abandoned in the belief that the writer has nothing to teach me—and, worse, is not even trying to learn. Over the past couple of years, as the evident decline of literary reading has been blamed on the ubiquity of smartphones or the supposed withdrawal of men, I’ve suspected that some readers might be tuning out fiction (or turning to the classics over contemporary work) for another reason: the sense that today’s novelists are not aiming to help with the practical matter of how to live.
George Saunders is an eminent exception to contemporary literature’s broader retreat from wisdom-seeking. The Booker-winning and best-selling author has not embedded direct, Eliot-style philosophizing within his fiction, but he is distinctive for thoroughly embracing the role of moral guide—and for seeing his preacher-writer role resonate with an unusually large audience. His fiction has always had an ethical thrust, at its strongest in inventive and often brilliant short stories that channel the economically weak and exploited. And Saunders’s enterprising publisher has lately offered his wise, witty, and tender sayings in stand-alone works: Congratulations, by the Way was adapted from a graduation speech enjoining kindness; A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a version of his Syracuse University course about Russian writers who, he explains, “regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool.” In A Swim, Saunders has given grateful critics a tidy summary of his message: “that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”
Amen. I mean that sincerely. So it was with some disappointment that I discovered that Saunders’s new novel, Vigil—although showcasing his great gifts for voice, farce, and tick-tick-tick plotting—suffers from the all-too-human foible of claiming high ideals while failing to actually abide by them. As in some too-pious novels of earlier eras, Vigil’s abundantly clear moral vision is enabled only by dodging the hardest ethical (and artistic) problem: the pragmatic task of fitting our morals to the confounding reality of human experience.
Like Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’s other novel, Vigil is set on the spooky cusp between life and death. The narrator, Jill, is essentially a supernatural priest—a ghost whose task is to swoop into the minds of the dying to provide “comfort” and “elevation” before judgment is rendered. Murdered at age 22, Jill has, after inhabiting and forgiving her murderer, reached a special state of being: “vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds’ time, a mile or ten thousand miles.” (Never has a novelist found a tidier vehicle for his own mission.) Jill has learned in her elevated state to see every individual as “an inevitable occurrence,” a fated being with choices “so severely delimited” that what feels like free will is actually “a sort of lavish jailing.”
[Read: George Saunders has a new mantra]
Jill’s “charge,” her new assignment, is an oil tycoon named K. J. Boone, who at 87 is dying of cancer and past the point of speech. In the novel’s first pages, Jill observes a wall of photos: Boone on oil rigs, at his many homes, and “leaning confidently against a podium, speaking to a tremendous crowd.” When she enters his mind, she finds “a steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph.” She scans for doubts and mistakes but finds “nothing, or nearly nothing. He was as sure of himself as ever a charge of mine had been.”
It was an odd thing to finish Vigil feeling that an oil tycoon had been treated unfairly. Saunders has for decades critiqued capitalist systems, but still, I figured I knew where this deathbed visitation must go: As Jill observed the turnings of Boone’s mind, she would uncover the self-satisfied titan’s hidden nobility and frailty; meanwhile, Boone would confront his uncertainties and failings, and the false caricatures at the novel’s start would by the end give way to a nuanced, proportionate truth.
What happens instead is more like a mobbing. Boone is relentlessly hounded by figments of his guilty memory, by other ghosts, and by his daughter—all of whom emphasize his nefarious role in delaying action to combat climate change. The lead ghost campaigner, a slapstick Frenchman, pelts Boone with apparitions: odd weather patterns, extinct birds, a starved man from a decimated Indian village. Boone’s daughter, praying at his bedside, veers into thinking about a documentary that one of her “libdope” friends tricked her into watching, which left her greatly disappointed in her father. Boone refuses chance after chance to admit error.
Although the prosecution of Boone is, characteristically of Saunders, often funny and sometimes moving, it is also unmistakably unkind. Saunders seems unwilling to convey Boone’s more sympathetic attributes without some swift reminder that he’s a bastard. Boone is self-made, but his memories of a dirt-poor childhood are undercut, one page later, by a scene in which he berates his employees and enjoys it. We see Boone snap at his “chubby bimbo” oncology nurse, call Jill a “stupid bitch,” and repeatedly insist that in his whole life, he “had done nothing wrong, not a goddamn thing,” and that anyone who suggests otherwise is an “idiot.” Of his exceptional professional success—Boone’s entire career—we are told only that “it had all been accomplished” with “work, hard work, but no real struggle. Up, up, up he went” and “never along the way had there been a moment of hesitation or doubt” until these “losers, trivial people,” began to “piss and moan” about climate change.
[Read: ‘The Moron Factory,’ a short story by George Saunders]
Boone’s major crime is, rather than selling oil to a world hungry for it, an act of dishonesty—largely a lie of omission. Although his company’s internal data showed a warming planet, Boone gave speeches, funded research, and sponsored lobbying and advertising campaigns to muddle the scientific consensus and delay regulatory action. This is an interesting choice of sin, because the failure to cop to inconvenient truths is precisely the cardinal sin of Vigil itself: the refusal to let Jill or Boone become more complex than cartoons.
Jill remains impossibly sentimental and pure of heart, even as she grows horrified by Boone and considers abandoning her effort to comfort him. As for Boone, we might invoke the Russians. Saul Bellow once wrote that what made Dostoyevsky a great novelist was his understanding that “the writer’s convictions, perhaps fanatically held, must be tamed by truth.” It seems to me that Saunders’s perhaps fanatical loathing of oil executives—Boone bears many similarities, in particular, to former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond—was not here tamed by the reality of how people find their roles in the world and justify the (sometimes villainous) choices those roles might require. Saunders proffers no evidence that Boone, say, wrestled with the responsibilities of leadership, or was charming or generous, or cared to do anything with other people but dominate them. One truth of which Vigil seems deliberately oblivious is that many of those who inspire confidence and deference, as Boone did, have something going for them. But the book cannot credit Boone with commonplace human thoughtfulness. Even his allies damn him by association: His fond daughter’s prayers reveal her to be a haughty, materialistic racist, and the ghosts of his former collaborators are transparently demonic, letting loose “hellish cackling laughter” at the memory of duping the public. I had the feeling of watching a show trial in which the defense, under the gaze of a stern commissar, has been forbidden to make a case.
I will avoid spoiling the precise mechanics of the ending, except to say that the reader’s satisfaction in Jill’s ultimate choice depends on a familiar idea that even the worst sinners deserve another chance—as long as they confess. This might be an ordinary perspective for a priest, but it felt strangely authoritarian for a fiction writer. Vigil’s lesson appears to be that right is right, wrong is wrong, and the primary challenge of virtuous living lies not in discerning or applying wisdom but rather in mustering, from a state of completed revelation, the grace to admit and forgive crystal-clear sins. The confidence of Vigil’s final judgment seems out of step with Saunders’s view, as stated in A Swim, that “the aim of art” is “to ask the big questions” such as: “How are we supposed to be living down here?”
[Read: The multiplying ‘Philip Roths’]
I should at this point concede that I enjoyed every swift page of Vigil’s prose. It is stuffed with lively wit and striking images, and I was delighted as usual by Saunders’s ability, like that of Hollywood’s defter practitioners, to rib himself and winkingly manipulate his tropes. But I was taken aback by the malice of staging a deathbed inquisition that reduces the decedent, whatever his offenses, to cliché. I would argue, if I might preach at Saunders for a moment, that the most sacred duty of the writer is to do full justice—to inhabit, alongside even maddening wickedness, a charitable understanding of the way a person sees himself—and that to do so is much kinder than merely offering a caricatured figure a shot at avoiding eternal torment.
Saunders has done far better, in Lincoln and in stories such as “Pastoralia” and “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” both at depicting the morally compromised and at humanely deflating the apparently righteous. My disappointment in Vigil came down to the waste of a perfect setup for exhibiting the worldly redemption of art—that is, its power to redeem us from insensitivity and self-satisfaction. Maybe despite Saunders’s best intentions, the novel instead stubbornly insists on a brutal worldview in which the way someone first appears turns out to be exactly how they are. In such a world, literature cannot serve much moral purpose. Perhaps it is an inevitable occurrence, as Jill would put it, that with age and eminence, we become a bit too firm in our judgments. Thank goodness, then, that so much can be forgiven.