An Uneasy Polemic

GEORGE SAUNDERS’S NEW “NOVEL” is 174 pages long and has no chapters—or, if you like, is one long chapter. Both it and the 60-page title story in his 2022 collection Liberation Day are narrated in the first person and invent a conceit whereby one character can have a vivid share in another’s experiences across time, using future technology in the earlier story, and here when in a supernatural state existing beyond death. Both works have to explain themselves as they go, and teach the reader some jargon too: in “Liberation Day,” “Speakers” who are “Pinioned” and waiting for a “Pulse”; in Vigil, those of the narrator’s “ilk” are assigned a “charge” whom they must “comfort.” Vigil’s story has more layers and some closure not possible in a shorter work, but it doesn’t quite work. It feels like a short story that has been built up, mainly with flashbacks, into a brief and not altogether satisfying novel, and regular readers of Saunders, particularly of Liberation Day, might wish it had instead been used to comprise a portion—say, 60 pages—of another collection.