How to Love a Monster

On George Saunders' 'Vigil'

Jackson Pollock, The Key, 1946, Oil on linen

George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love. But in a different way, Vigil opens up entirely new ground, by asking what it means to view the world’s depravities not just as wrongs to be made right, but as wounds to be healed.

For much of his career, class and the economy have been his primary framework for working out this question. Whether in his famed story “The Semplica-Girls Diaries,” in which migrants make a living as front-yard ornaments, or in “Escape from Spiderhead,” in which experiment subjects are made to work off their debt in pleasure research centers, we have seen how the systems we’ve set up can destroy us in sometimes comic ways.

But telling a story about the horrors of the world that doesn’t careen into despair is no small trick. A story about migrants who sell themselves as animatronics for the wealthy could easily be told as a threadbare morality play. It would be easy to take the story of political autocracy, as with his recent “Love Letter,” and to tell it remorselessly. But such stories would also be incredibly boring, and arguably less true. For intertwined throughout these stories of rapacious capitalism, is an undercurrent of empathy. To return to “Semplica-Girls,” the protagonist of the story is a middle-class man trapped in the rat race, who hires the Semplica-Girls for a party to elevate his social status. It would be easy to merely condemn the lawn ornaments’ exploitation at the hands of a status-conscious consumer. But Saunders juxtaposes the girls’ suffering with the love the protagonist has for his children, and his sincere desire to help them be respected in the world. Even dictators have mothers, and even monsters want to have a friend.

But such sentiments, while absolutely true, feel not only wrong but gauche in an age of ICE raids and government malice towards its citizens. It doesn’t square with our desire for justice, much less our hope to see the powerful and unjust have their day of reckoning. And while in Saunders’ writings, there are occasions in which the loving monster finds their comeuppance, there are plenty of occasions when this contradiction of love and suffering caused remains unresolved: the loving monster just walks away; the Semplica-Girls go on undaunted. For love — actual affection — must be true, even among the monsters, if we are to have any hope out of the horror.

So how do we reconcile this? One possibility might be that history will simply rewrite the monsters as pure monsters. It is easy, particularly in light of the economic critique Saunders employs, to write off the love which the monsters seek as pure ideology, a phantasm which is really just the love of money and status in disguise. But Saunders has seemed to prefer another possibility: that both of these are true, and that earthly life is not the only venue for working out this contradiction. In fits and starts in his earlier work, this possibility of resolution has appeared, as characters die and pass into whatever lies next. In stories such as “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Mother’s Day,” and “Ghoul,” we have already been invited in part into this possibility, as central characters trip just over the line of life into death with their own lives unresolved, leaving the reader to wonder what lies next in their story.

After reading Saunders’ fullest treatment of this theme thus far — his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo — I can understand why he opts for a less than serene vision of the world to come. For many of the ghosts we meet in the afterlife in Lincoln are unresolved in themselves, haunted by unfinished business. We might wish for a more merciful postmortem for the figures we meet there. But for Saunders there is work yet to be finished beyond the grave. Saunders’ vision in Lincoln is of an afterlife teeming with real work to be done, with the dead carrying their lack of resolution around in the form of engorged genitalia and multiplying eyes instead of chains and lockboxes. What began to emerge more directly in Lincoln was the acknowledgment, to paraphrase Saint Paul, that the struggle of life is not against flesh and blood, but takes place in the intimacies of the invisible.

That the afterlife reflects, in its chaos, the unresolved nature of life is, I think, one of the strongest aspects of Saunders’ vision. For in many recent literary depictions of the Great Beyond, the maelstrom of life is traded for stillness and quiet. What comes next in this vision is something like J.K. Rowling’s quiet train station, Matt Haig’s library of possibilities, Alice Sebald’s omniscient narrator in a quiet space. Such visions treat the Great Beyond as a place of silence, a pivot from the chaos of the world. But Saunders draws from an older set of writers who see no such relief in death, in which the afterlife is just as raucous as life — we are not done with life just because we die. Whether in Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” or Dante’s Divine Comedy, the afterlife in this tradition is one in which the wildness of life is amplified: death is not relief from the injustice of life, but a place to contend with it even more directly.

For as long as Saunders has been mulling over the ways in which capitalism wrecks the world, it seems death has been on his mind, too. In a recent interview, Saunders notes that the three truths of facing death appear as “you’re not permanent; you’re not the most important thing; you’re not separate.” In death, Saunders observes, every person is faced with the fact that they are — in the end — a character in a larger drama: no amount of capital or self-inflated importance will save you. Either we come to terms with this in life, or death will remind us of this in less gentle ways. Perhaps Scrooge being haunted in the winter of his life is not just a truer, but a kinder, vision than we remember.

All of this brings us to Vigil, Saunders’ latest in a long line of explorations of death and what it ultimately exposes about living. K.J. Boone is dying in his Dallas home, attended to by his loving wife and, unseen to the living, a cast of spirits who serve as doulas for the dying. Boone lies in his giant mahogany bed, in monogrammed silk, stubbornly satisfied with his life. On death’s door, he brings with him a long legacy of oil production, climate change denial, and wealth.

It is easy to read Boone as a buffoonish cartoon, but the longer we stay with him, the more Saunders helps us to be sympathetic to a man whose career was spent making billions off of misinformation and denial. We learn about his impoverished upbringing; we see him communicating with his long-dead mother (herself a member of the afterlife chorus swirling unseen above the Dallas metroplex). And ultimately, as he understands that death is on its way, we see Boone fearful and angry. As the narrator puts it, everything that he loved is about to be lost behind a door that cannot be opened again.

Chief among the doulas attending to Boone is Jill Blaine, midwife to hundreds of souls. Her aim in attending the dying is not to change them, but to comfort them. She is part of a guild of spirits whose purpose is to help the dying let go. In less capable hands, Jill would also be a cardboard cutout, but slowly, we see that her work is tied to her own past. Having died in explosive fashion, Blaine never had the opportunity to come to terms with her own death, had been denied comfort in her last moments the way she now seeks to give comfort to others. But — as in life — Jill’s approach to the contradictions of love and horror is not the resolution on offer. Alongside her in this liminal world are a French spirit, some flatulent pranksters, and images of Boone’s past collaborators who are aiming not for comfort, but for retribution.

Boone as a villainous, self-assured antagonist feels a little strained at times, a Jay Gatsby for the climate era. And at times, as other reviewers have noticed, Saunders leans on his themes of the spirit world as too much of a wild rumpus, with spirits who poop out smaller versions of themselves and at times overshadow the more subtle lead spirit Jill. But these are conventions that help draw our attention to the main question: in Boone’s last act, what should we be aiming at? Repentance, consolation, or something more sublime?

Jill helps us to see Boone for what he is: a man who has devoted his whole life, shaped his family existence, built out his most strongly held values around the proposition that the world needed oil to keep on spinning. And in this, she grasps that it may be too much to ask Boone to repent. The aims of the other tormenters — to get Boone to change, to finally atone for the damage he has done to the world — assume that a dying person might be compelled to see their whole life as a mistake, and might apologize for everything that they committed their whole being to. The love he had for his family, his work, and his own place in the world were real, though, and not to be denied.

Jill, by contrast to those seeking Boone’s repentance, understands that at the end, we see our lives as knots that cannot be easily untangled. It’s here that Jill’s mandate to comfort rather than change strikes home: she understands that there comes a point at which a committed life, for better or worse, gains momentum and will find itself locked into a direction so deeply ingrained that it cannot wish to do otherwise. All Boone wanted to do was make his parents proud, to look life squarely in the face, and to enjoy it along the way.

None of this is to excuse Boone’s sins, but to humanize them. Boone gave his family love and a great life, in no small part by poisoning the atmosphere; Boone tried to honor his parents and did so by accumulating more wealth than a person could possibly use. The other spirits are right to force Boone to come to terms with his life, but wrong to frame it as an act of pure repentance: to recant a life is not just to recant one’s sins, but the love that made those sins possible. This is the most human of contradictions — the pursuit of a good life by bad means — and it is this that causes Jill to realize there is something humans are meant to pursue beyond both justice and consolation: the ineffable mystery which she terms “elevation.”

In the world of Vigil, the term is elusive, signifying a goal for these souls which exists beyond the categories of repentance and retribution. It is the language she gives to this complex contradiction that Vigil works out: that because we are capable of both great love and great devastation, the aim of our lives must not be simply to seek justice against wrongs or to atone for our wrongdoings, but to seek mercy for ourselves and others. In the language of one Christian writer, our lives are characterized by the search for that good which we are meant for as creatures, a good that we frequently try to acquire in destructive ways. In Vigil, this is true of both the living and the dead. For even the spirits who guide the dying are wounded and in need of repair; the spirits too are working out their salvation in fear and trembling, seeking this “elevation” even as they help the dying to move into the afterlife. And so, both the dying and the spirits are in search of the mercy — that elevation of the soul — that will help them to acknowledge that both the love they had in life and the wrong they did were equally true.

That there is a synthesis beyond retribution and atonement–this “elevation”— is a powerful truth that has meaning for both the living and the dead. It is this recognition — that there may be something beyond pure justice and cheap forgiveness — which proves the most perplexing for both the characters of the novel, and for the reader looking at Vigil as a simple morality play. For neither readers nor characters of the book can pretend that the damage Boone contributed to is an illusion. But neither can we denigrate Boone’s love for his family as a sham. What Saunders points us to, ultimately, is not repentance but mercy, with ourselves and others. In this, we might find hope that when we come to the end of our own lives, we might see them not as pure failures or successes, but as gestures in pursuit of truths we fail to name in their entirety. That mercy, after all, might be the very thing to practice in life, long before the shadow of death finds us.

Myles Werntz is Associate Professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of numerous books in theology and ethics, and writes at Taking Off and Landing: Explorations in the Moral Life