VIGIL by George Saunders

Summary

Book Riot – The Podcast

Episode: VIGIL by George Saunders

Date: January 28, 2026
Hosts: Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky

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Overview

This special episode of the Book Riot Podcast sees Jeff and Rebecca devoting their attention to VIGIL, the highly anticipated new novel by George Saunders, released that day. As a major early release and only Saunders' second novel (after the acclaimed Lincoln in the Bardo), VIGIL becomes the focal point for a deep dive into Saunders’ style, literary concerns, and the profound moral and existential questions the novel poses. The episode explores the book's plot, themes, and the ways Saunders crafts his singular literary universe.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Saunders’ Literary Persona and Expectations

• Saunders’ singularity: He defies easy summary and subverts reader expectations, never settling for mere literary twists but heading into emotional and philosophical complexity ([04:00]).
  • “For those of you haven’t read Saunders, expect the unexpected. And not from like an M. Night Shyamalan sort of twisty way. But even the first five pages are not indicative of what you're going to get for the whole thing.” – Jeff [04:07]
• Known as a writing teacher and “all-time weirdo” with a unique blend of satirical and humane storytelling, but hard to pigeonhole ([06:08]).

2. Basic Premise & Saunders’ Narrative Universe

• VIGIL draws on an afterlife setting similar to Lincoln in the Bardo. The narrator, Jill, is a spirit tasked with shepherding the dying – namely K.J. Boone, a dying oil tycoon ([06:29–07:30]).

  • “The pitch is: an oil tycoon is dying and the main character... is a ghost – her work in the afterlife is to help dying people make their crossing. That’s the jacket copy, but what you actually get is so much stranger...” – Rebecca [06:31]

• The “rules” of this universe carry over from Lincoln in the Bardo, but previous reading is not required. The afterlife is not a neat religious construct but is “pragmatic, ambiguous, and emotional” ([07:00, 09:43]).

3. Themes of Judgment, Accountability, and Human Nature

• The central tension around K.J. Boone is how the afterlife system—and the spirits—will judge a man who contributed to climate change and fossil fuel denial. But Saunders complicates simple narratives of guilt and redemption ([09:01–12:15]).

  • “For a little while I was like, this is unusual for Saunders to be this dogmatic and straightforward... if there’s only one thing I expect from Saunders it’s an underlying sense of the humane.” – Jeff [09:09]

• The reality of “unfinished business,” agency in the afterlife, and what—if anything—meaningful happens at the brink of death ([10:30–14:00]).

• Utilizes “Dickens vibes”: like Marley’s ghost visiting Scrooge, but Saunders sidesteps easy lessons or closure ([11:30]).

4. Comfort, Change, and the Limits of Judgment

• The novel’s moral questions center on whether people can truly change, who is responsible for judgment, and what comfort means for the dying—even when they’ve done harm ([13:23–17:22]).

  • “She believes her job is just to comfort. And these other spirits are like, no, we need you to do some other stuff... the real questions of the novel were... what are we as humans to do about the existence of immoral things in our lives?” – Rebecca [13:25–13:52]
  • “How could they be anyone other than they are?” – Jeff, paraphrasing Saunders’s recurring question [13:52]

• Neither Jeff nor Rebecca finds the novel prescriptive; instead, it “dwells in the question,” echoing Chekhov’s maxim that “a good book does not answer a question: it formulates the question the right way” ([15:00–15:23]).

5. Free Will, Systems, and Moral Complexity

• Discussion of free will: If so much is predetermined, where does culpability begin and end? The hosts relay the book’s concern with systemic evil and how “replacement value” complicates individual blame ([15:23–17:15]).

• The tension between individual moral change and systemic inertia:

  • “How much of an individual is culpable within a system?” – Jeff [15:57]
  • “How much are we hypocrites? … That is absolutely not reconciled” – Jeff [21:34]

6. Sanders’s Narration: Humor, Humanity, and Structure

• Despite heavy themes, the book is suffused with Saunders’s signature humor, earthiness, and warmth:

  • Scenes like Jill’s gassy grandmother and playful ghostly mischief leaven the gravitas ([40:28–41:56]).
  • “We fart. And that's funny and endearing and human at the same time.” – Jeff [40:41]

• The structure—with no chapter breaks—pushes readers toward immersion, making the novel best read in as few sessions as possible ([42:03–43:08]).

7. Comparisons, Context, and Reception

• The hosts note similarities to other novels about mortality and reflection, such as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead ([38:05]).

• They address critical reception, particularly a Dwight Garner review from the New York Times that Jeff and Rebecca strongly disagree with, arguing it mistakes Saunders’s questions for answers and misses his refusal to impose judgment ([18:01–19:18]).

  • “He just completely Missed that Saunders isn’t answering any questions in this novel. … It’s the Rilke ‘learn to love the question’” – Rebecca [18:14]

• Both see VIGIL as a front-runner for “publishing event of the year” and among their likely best reads ([05:02, 17:05]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Saunders’s Difficulty:
  • “He’s impossible to write a synopsis for. I really feel for the publicist... whose job is to decide what the copy on the book is.” – Rebecca [04:28]
• On the Book’s Core:
  • “A good book does not answer a question. It’s about trying to formulate the question the right way.” – via Chekhov, paraphrased by Rebecca [15:11–15:23]
• On Judgment vs. Comfort:
  • “If you care about protecting people, then what do you do to – for or with the people who are putting them at stake?” – Jeff [17:15]
• On Empathy & Limitation:
  • “We all have limitations somewhere. And [Saunders] is also wondering what the capacity for change is and if or how that capacity or limitation is related to a person being held accountable.” – Rebecca [33:33]
• Critical Grudge:
  • “Dwight Garner has never been wronger in his life, and I’m gonna be mad about it for a long time.” – Rebecca [18:01]
• Saunders’ Style:
  • “He’s so... embodied. Even as he’s like, ‘the self is a trap’... we fart. And that’s funny and endearing and human at the same time.” – Jeff [40:41]
• On “Boring Prestige”:
  • “Everyone’s vision of power and prestige is sort of the same… How boring that is.” – Jeff [45:42]

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Important Timestamps

• [04:00] – Discussing Saunders’s unpredictability and writerly reputation
• [06:29] – Introducing the plot and metaphysics of VIGIL
• [09:01]–[14:00] – Deep dive into the “judgment” theme and comparisons to historical and literary figures
• [15:23] – Free will, systemic evil, and the complexity of judgment
• [18:01] – Addressing Dwight Garner’s review and misreadings of Saunders
• [21:33] – Hypocrisy, systems, and unresolved tension
• [40:28]–[41:56] – Saunders’s comic touches and humanity
• [42:03] – Structural choices and reading experience advice
• [44:30] – Saunders as the quintessential “intriguing, interesting, thinky” author
• [47:52] – Misreadings of angels vs. ghosts, and afterlife metaphysics

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Conclusion & Recommendations

Both hosts are unreserved in their recommendation of VIGIL, seeing it as a rich, provocative, and humane new novel from a master. It stands as an ideal entry into introspective, morally complex literature that asks rather than answers the big questions. Readers new to Saunders might start with his short stories (Tenth of December), but VIGIL is approachable, straightforward in prose yet endlessly complicated in implication.

Rebecca:

“Go read. So fun. 172 pages. Not hard to get through. A real great one to have in the clubhouse...” [47:05]

Jeff:

“All things are possible in the world of books and reading, but I’m not sure there’s anyone... I will find them intriguing, interesting and thinky... I think Sanders is it.” [44:12]

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For those considering VIGIL or interested in the boundaries of literary fiction, morality, and what we owe to one another (living and dead), this discussion is both a primer and a set of questions you’ll continue turning over—long after you finish reading or listening.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[C]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[B]

And today we have the great pleasure devoting. I don't know how long. Could be 10 minutes, could be 45 minutes.

[C]

Come on.

[B]

I know we're not gonna. It's a shorty, but it's, it's not.

[C]

We can't do anything.

[B]

That's true. We can't even do the intro in this less than 30 seconds vigil by George Saunders, which comes out today. We're recording on Tuesday, January 27, the 1st, I'd say first really big book release of the year. I mean, I guess half his age. Came out last week. Getting a lot of buzz. Had some conversations with that. I read the first five pages in the bookstore the other day. Bracing. It's a bracing five pages, Rebecca.

[C]

I have a flight coming up at the end of the week and this feels to me like potential plane reading. It sounds like it will be gripping. I'm going to give it a try. We'll see if I have the stomach for it.

[B]

Yeah, but I guess housekeeping stuff. Zero to well read. There's a new episode out today, Bartleby the Scrivener. Our first foray into a short story and we had a good time supporting you. Or we can do nothing for 10 minutes. We went an hour and a half on 45 pages of Bartleby the Scrivener. One of my favorite ones. We talked. We both love that story. It holds up great and so much.

[C]

Weirder than you think it is.

[B]

Yeah, we, we make, I think a pretty good case for it to be a book club object to read. Like just hand it out at the beginning of book club and then read it and talk about it there. Make sure everyone's done the reading. I think people, the more I've thought about it, I think short story clubs are really cool.

[C]

You know, one of our listeners is in a short story club. Somebody commented on Patreon recently that in addition to some other things they were doing, they are part of the Short story club or that's exactly what they do. Get together, read the story and then talk about it while it's fresh. I love idea especially because my not principle but it's up there. Piece of resistance to being a book club member is I first don't want you to tell me what to do. So there's that. But then if I'm going to do the homework, I want everybody else.

[B]

Yeah, I agree with that. 1000.

[C]

I am so not down for like we're a wine club with a book problem. Like that's. And not all book clubs are that way. Don't send me emails. But I've been a member of enough of them where it's like we're not actually here to talk about the book. And like that's. I like social hangouts. Let's just not call them book clubs. But I think the short story club is a great way to like you have the accountability. Everybody's read the thing cause you sat there together and then you can talk about it while it's fresh. I really like this idea.

[B]

What? I think we're onto something here. Just a discussion club where you actually consume the thing you're talking about in the first 20 minutes of your meeting. Right. So it could be a poem, it could be a New Yorker article. It could be. Let's not make it on our phones or anything. But it could be a short film. A document like that would be fun. I would like that.

[C]

I would like that too. You could all get together and watch like the 30 minute episode of whatever thing is really in the zeitgeist. And then everybody can talk about it. Because then you, you get out of that millennial trap of. Did you read. Did you see that thing? Did you read this piece?

[B]

You're like. You're like those. Those like seagulls trying to match sort of matching based on your media consumption there.

[C]

Like gone are the days of that When Harry Met Sally dinner where she's like, someone said that restaurants are in the 80s, what theater was in the 60s. And he's like I wrote it.

[B]

And not only that, but he wrote it. This is even a smaller world than that. At the same point. Now, I don't think you could read vigil at the beginning of a book club, but it's just on the border of a novella. My review copy here is 172 pages. I don't know how that translated into hardback, but I think it took me two hours to get through this slim George Saunders volume. And before we get into this Saunders, for those of you haven't read Saunders, expect the unexpected. And not from like an M. Night Shyamalan sort of twisty way. But even the first five pages are not indicative of what you're going to get for the whole thing.

[C]

He's impossible to write a synopsis for. I really feel for the publicist who's our editor, whose job is to decide what the copy on the book is.

[B]

Well, and the short stories are worse because then you have 15 problems of synopses to write for this one, I think actually the hook is fairly simple to describe and it stays the hook for most of it. But the hook of course is just, just the surface level version of it. With Saunders. I'm excited to read a new Saunders thing, as I am to anyone that comes out. I'll just speak for me here specifically.

[C]

I am too. This is my front runner for publishing event of my reading year.

[B]

Yeah, I can't. It's only his second novel. His first novel, Lincoln the Bardo, I would, I don't quail to say, is a contemporary classic, a masterwork of its own.

[C]

Yeah, I reread it over the holidays and just wow.

[B]

It's wow. And then if you're an audiobook fiction person, I've heard tell that like Nick Offerman, I think is the main narrator and there's a bunch of other people. I don't do fictional audio, though I've been sorely tempted many times to return to that. And so with Vigil with Saunders, I kind of don't even need to know what the backstory is. I'm just interested. Saunders himself is a tender, sharp, inquiring craftsman who is born out of greater strangeness than he presents in his newsletter or his affect in the end. So I think that can be a little bit disconcerting to people who think they're getting, I don't know, you think you might be getting like a Kent Horouf novel or something like that? Like a good, well written literary fiction novel of a certain kind. Maybe like maybe an amorth towels maybe sort of affect. Like a professorial.

[C]

I mean, and he's a great. Yeah, he. He's one of the great, well known writing teachers. He's taught at Syracuse University forever and ever. But yeah, just an all time weirdo in the best possible way. I saw a headline that referred to him as a satirist and I was like, I'm not sure about that.

[B]

He does it sometimes. Satire sometimes.

[C]

But I understand he's difficult to pin down and that's one of the most exciting things about Saunders to me is that you get this book for which the pitch is an oil tycoon is dying and the main character or the narrator is a ghost, a spirit of some kind. She's dead and her work in the afterlife is to help dying people make their crossing. That's the jacket copy of the book, but what you actually get is so much stranger than that in a way that is hard to explain, especially if you haven't read Lincoln and the Bardo like. But I also want to say you don't need to have read Lincoln and the Bardo to enjoy this. They exist in the same universe though, and so some of the rules that Saunders establishes for his characters and their lives or their afterlives in Lincoln and the Bardo port over into this book and it does enrich the reading experience to have that back knowledge, I felt like.

[D]

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[C]

But she in the first five pages she tumbles to earth while her body is forming or or her spirit her spirit body. She's not corporeally visible to humans on earth. She's only visible to other spirits, others of her ilk, as she says, and from there like we're off to the races with she's going into his name is K.J.

[B]

Boone.

[C]

She's going into his house to enter into his thoughts and try to communicate with him about his life and his.

[B]

Impending death and we find out pretty quickly that he has been an oil magnate of the worst sort and that it's in the course of his career he's been instrumental in the furtherance of the petroleum industry. And not just that, but also in the gaslighting, denialist PR mode of undermining science and making an affirmative case for, well, isn't it always getting warmer and there's always floods. And for a little while I was like, this is unusual for Saunders to be this dogmatic and straightforward because I guess I should have said this at the top. If there's something I do expect from Saunders, if there's only one thing I expect from Saunders is an underlying sense of the humane. And how was he going to do that? In this mode where this character, K.J. boone, who I think must be a version of T. Boone Pickens, the Oklahoma State benefactor and oil magnate, or just that's what oilman's name sounds like to Americans, is right in there. How are we going to deal with this situation where this particular person clearly has been a vessel for bad outcomes? And what moral system are we in? There is a God of some kind. It doesn't seem to neatly or even roughly fall upon any particular religious tradition. It seems monotheistic. But there is some sort of afterlife. She calls whatever she is our narrator here, the shepherd, the chiron esque figure, people of her ilk. So there's other people who have not yet ascended. So like if you're still a ghost or whatever this thing is, it's a kind of purgatory. You have some unfinished business and there's a lot of people with unfinished business. But it's not clear how you get chosen to do her job or if the job is part of her unfinished business. She has all kinds of complicated feelings, as one might, I guess, about her own existence and death, which I don't. You know, we're going to verge on spoiler territory here and we'll maybe make a harder break, but what her job is in relationship to this person, his morality, the totality of his life works and his passing is pretty unclear for most of it. Like, she's there. But to what end? I think I never really got a good answer to Rebecca.

[C]

I think, no, I didn't get a good answer to it either. And the other spirits, like, first of all, Dickens vibes all over this year visited by spirits, like this guy is French Marley deathbed. Yeah, basically there's a friend right as Jill, our main character, right as she is showing up, this French henchman shows up as well, also a ghost. And he turns out to have been the person in life who invented the engine. And so he says, you know, I contributed to the invention of the beast. And now he is roaming the spirit world around the earth, visiting other people as they die who have also contributed to problems on Earth and trying to get them to see the error of their ways. And he wants Jill to do that with K.J.

[B]

Boone.

[C]

He's like, you're here. You make him see the error of his ways and repent of his sin. She does not think that's what her job is. And I think that the. The great trick of this novel is that you enter, for me, you enter into it with that question that you had of, like, how is Sanders gonna handle morality and judgment about this guy's life? And that really the questions are about everybody around KJ Boone, like, like, it's clear he was a bad guy who did bad stuff, and maybe he's going to reckon with it. But everybody else around him struggling with how accountable should he be held now on his death. What is he responsible for? What does it look to try to hold someone account look like to try to hold someone accountable, if indeed that's what you're going to do? Or what do we owe each other? Like, we do these immortal questions that aren't asked.

[B]

They're all over here, by the way.

[C]

They're all here, but, like, what is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How much can people change? What is like, the issues?

[B]

How do I know what I know?

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And that one of Jill's things is that she believes her job is just to comfort. And these other spirits are like, no, we need you to do some other stuff with him. And I felt that the real questions of the novel were there were in, like, what are we as humans to do about the existence of immoral things in our lives? People who do bad things, but yet are still people. Because Saunders is always, how could you other be sus.

[B]

Right, this refrain over. And how could they be anyone other than they are? That's a. We've talked about this before. Like, that's like the warrant of liberal education that everyone has to believe is true for education or frankly, morality or accountability or anything else to matter is like, it could be, you know, free will, whatever you want to call it, it could be other than it will be. That's it. That's the only question.

[C]

And Jill tells K.J. boone, like, you were inevitable this was. You were gonna be this way. And she gets pushback on that from other spirits of like, is it really inevitable that a person is going to do the kinds of things that he did or anything?

[B]

Are good people inevitable, too? Should they not get credit for their good works? Because they're just gonna be who they're gonna be and they're inevitable as well.

[C]

And we. I don't think it's a spoiler to say we find out early in the book that she was killed and that she has come to the conclusion that even her murderer was inevitable, that she's kind of let him off the hook. And that language of let off the hook comes up in the novel where other spirits are accusing her of letting Boone off the hook. He should be held accountable. He shouldn't be let go for this. And I am thinking so much about these interviews Sanders has given in the run up to the publication of this, where he says that one of his guideposts right now is this Chekhov quote, that a good book does not answer a question. It's about trying to formulate the question the right way. And I spent a lot of my reading time thinking about what are the questions that Sanders is formulating here.

[B]

Yeah, it seemed to me that as I got through it, the higher order questions is how do you judge judgment? How do you factor in judgment? And I don't remember if it's a philosopher or a Snapple it or whatever, but something that stuck with me for a million years is even if, even if free will doesn't exist, we have to behave as if it does, because otherwise there's no account. If there's a chance that free will is real, you have to act as if it doesn't hold people accountable, because otherwise, then it's really. You could really get off the rails. And then if you act like there's free will and there isn't, then there's no free will anyway, so it doesn't matter. So it's all upside to a better world to act as if there's free will. So I've never really. I think it's an interesting college bull session. Like, if you've not yet have ever been in college, you can sort of tick off the college bull session ones. This is one. Do we all see orange? Like all that kind of stuff. But for Saunders in this book and for Jill and others, and I think for the reader, the most interesting question is, at what point does it matter what can actually be done? How much of an individual is culpable with an individual system? Because as I think one of these other ways of Thinking about inevitable as well. If it weren't you in this system, it would have been someone else. So, like the replacement value of someone else. How do you think about that different kind of situation? How do you think about randomness? Like, she. Again, if you don't want spoilers, stop listening now. Thank you so much. It's great. It's one of my favorite books. It's wonderful in six months. And I would be very shocked if it's not my 10 favorite reads of the year because of the kinds of questions we're about to talk about. But that how we deal with uncertainty of truth and uncertainty of judgment, then what is very much on Sandra's mind because when I said humaneness, he's. He's moral and humane. And those are actually really hard to yoke together. Right.

[C]

They are.

[B]

If you care about protecting people, then what do you do to. For or with the people who are putting them at stake.

[C]

Yeah. And that Jill has concluded that the humane thing to do is to comfort the person who's dying, no matter what they did, matter how bad of a person they were on earth and what the consequences were. And she's not really. She doesn't really get much support for that from anybody else.

[B]

It seems they have a wide latitude, the ilk about what their purview is.

[C]

And she refers to it as elevation that she was elevated into this job. And I'm not sure that that is what Saunders thinks she's doing. I made the mistake after I made my notes for today about reading a couple of reviews.

[B]

Oh, I haven't looked at anything. Thing. Sorry.

[C]

Dwight Garner has never been wronger in his life, and I'm gonna be mad about it for a long time.

[B]

I like this for you. This is my favorite. Rebecca, look.

[C]

A new enemy.

[B]

Critical grudge.

[C]

Critical grudge, Yes. I mean, we. We can get into that.

[B]

Okay. Wrong. Okay.

[C]

I mean, I think that he ascribes a lot of Jill's. Garner read a lot of Jill's perspectives as being Saunders's perspectives. That comfort and letting people off.

[B]

That's like the number one trap. Like, that's what. That's when there's the meat in the net, in the force. Like, wow, that like tasty meat. Don't go after that.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And there, you know, Saunders gave this graduation speech several years ago about, like, the importance of kindness, and it went viral. They published it as a little book. And Garner draws on that and is like, you know, he strayed from kindness into, like, everybody deserves comfort. And I think he just completely Missed that Saunders isn't answering any questions in this novel. He really is. It's the Rilke like learn to love. The question he's really dwelling in like, is it, is it just part of humanity that people deserve comfort as they are dying? And what does comfort look like? And how do you balance that with accountability for their actions? Like, it probably helps to know that Sanders practices Buddhism and that misreadings of Buddhism abound.

[B]

That the idea certainly outweigh the straightforward readings of Buddhism.

[C]

Yeah, like the idea of practicing non judgment doesn't mean that you don't draw moral judgments. It means it's more complex than that. But I think that and you know, stay later for my Buddhism 101 course but that he's, he has a clear sense of morality and I think he's wrestling here with yeah, what do, what do we owe people? What is the right way to treat somebody? But his judgment of Boone is all over the page. Boone is a short guy. We know it from the very beginning that like he's, you know, multiple references to bantam roosters. He's get. He is called the cock of the walk. Like I was waiting for a Napoleon reference of like this is just a little man who has had to make himself big in this way to compensate. And Sandra sees that. I think Sandra sees Boone as a small person. And the question is these people are real in our lives and in our world. So what do we do?

[B]

And he's not. I think the more I got into it at first it felt a little straightforward and I should have known and I was holding in advance like this seems straightforward. So be careful out there. Right. Because that's what they want. You looking this way and they come sideways. Clever girl. Velociraptors.com know but I think for me he is so as weird as he is, he's also very careful and I think he's calibrated this within an inch of its life to be interesting and fraught because he is not a serial killer. For example, there's a different version of this book where this person dying is a real like killed people with his own hands monster. Because the other thing the book continuously does holds to account the benefits all of us enjoy from the. Well, so many of us in my social class like I'll be very careful about this. Enjoy. You and I are both getting on planes next week. Even as we think the fossil fuel industry bad. We do not ride bikes in 20 degree below weather to get to jobs that we don't have to Go to the offices for. And this is a very common counter to a left wing progressive indictment of the petroleum industry. Industry. The problem is it happens to be true and it gets mixed in with all these bad faith efforts that's never really taken seriously. And I think Saunders is actually taking that point quite seriously here.

[C]

I think so too.

[B]

He's providing something that most of us have not given up even as we're dieting. How much are we hypocrites? I think is very much a question on the page here. And that is absolutely not reconciled in any stretch of the. And it's just held in front of us to do something with on our own.

[C]

I think if you come out of a Saunders book as especially this one, thinking that he's made any kind of argument.

[B]

Yeah, you got return, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go directly to Reading jail.

[C]

Yeah. And. And we know from Lincoln and the Bardo the rules of this universe are that the, the ones who are ghosts are there because as you said, they have some kind of unfinished business and they are choosing to be there. They get to go like the, the language they use is oh, he went immediately like for someone who died and immediately went to like wherever the final place in the afterlife is, wherever they.

[B]

Go at the end of the Good Place, I guess to spoil my show as well.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. But Jill and all of her ilk have chosen to stay for some reason and we get a lot of insight into like that it has something to do with being still attached in some way to who they were in life.

[B]

Some piece of it, some piece of.

[C]

They can't let go yet to the idea of the self, like this is where it gets really Buddhist is you yourself is a trap. Selfhood is a trap. Identity is a trap. Attachment to the idea of yourself as, as a self and as a. As any one thing in life is what holds these beings in the afterlife back from being able to. To complete dying to like to accept that they are dead and go to whatever the final place is. And having that in my head really helped me not just take Jill as the Saunders avatar in the book. She's made some choices and she tells us straight up. She goes back to visit parts of her life and she gets all mixed up at one point because she starts to feel that she's more Jill than she is her spirit self.

[B]

Yeah. She gets a little too much flesh or something a little too corporeal and that's in the wrong direction.

[C]

Yeah. And that's not good. And it's that she's doing kind of some of the same things that K.J. boone is doing as he's dying. She's going back to tell a story about herself. And he, as he's dying, is attached to a certain narrative of himself. And I think that's if, if any, if anything of Saunders really creeps in here or of what we know about his spiritual practices and perspective, it's that, that, like, watch out for getting attached to a certain reading of yourself and a certain reading of the world.

[B]

I think it's also important in terms of the calibration of who. There's like the who, but also the what and the when. Like, we are told explicitly that this is not a moment where you can intervene in someone's life so that they can use their power to, like, undo the DE Boone here has no ability to be like, get on C Span and say, you know what? I've got something to tell you all, and do some. He just can't do it. Like, he literally. Maybe they're not in a position where the difference from, well, many different Christmas Carol is this is not a moment where the person can learn a lesson and go live a better life. Now maybe they can go live a better afterlife. That's something that's brought in here. But then even living a better afterlife, they're conscribed to meeting someone at the moment of their death or very close to it when their life is done, like the story of their life is done. Their moral choices have been made, whatever. Great. I guess the score in the Good Place has been set. Like there's no more pluses and minuses. And I think that's where Sandra's comes into in the end, when it comes down to it. And there is no possibility, hope, directionality, or avenue to atone, to do something else for someone. What we should extend that person is presence. And maybe as neutral as that, because she's not like, wiping his ass and stuff, she's just sort of emotionally there. And that she's not even a comfort to him all the time. Like, sometimes she's agitating him. But for someone to be there in human relation, Saunders is not willing to give that uttermost extremity up. And I think that's very important.

[C]

I think so too. And like, if you're listening to this at this point and you haven't read it and you don't mind a spoiler, Boone is practically, like, immobile. Like, just from a practical logistics of.

[B]

The novel kind of being morally tortured to some degree as he's sitting there.

[C]

He can't get out of bed, he can't even sit, speak. Like there are a couple times where he wants something and Jill knows what he wants because she can hear his thoughts and she tries to transmit the thought to him of like, well, say, tell your wife who's in the room here that you want water. And he can't do it. He can't move his arm to knock something over to get her attention. So they're like, agency is gone from him and maybe he can internally have some kind of change, but we would never know.

[D]

Jill would know.

[B]

Why would it matter? I mean, that's the other thing is like, why would it matter?

[C]

Yeah, Jill would know, but. Right. The people of the world who want to hold, hold him accountable would never know. What, what do we do with that? Like, his daughter shows up near the end and his daughter has backed him her whole life. But now she has started to see stories coming out about things her dad did that had maybe been suppressed or kept out of the news. And she's trying to re, wonder, do I have to rethink my whole understanding of this man? We get to see that that tortures him, but she has no idea. And, and is that useful? Is it useful for her to say that to him? What are the things that matter right at the end? Yeah, I think you're right that if Saunders is doing anything there, it's like all we have in the end is our humanity and how we treat someone as they are dying is as much a reflection of us as it is of them.

[B]

Because if you give that up, then all sorts of things are possible and rational and justifiable. And I don't think he's willing to, he's certainly not willing to entertain the idea of a hell. Right. This is not a. Well, he didn't atone for. He didn't atone for it and he didn't get his come up as an actual life. And so sorry, you're gonna have to spend your life in hell. The closest version to hell is sort of not getting, not going, not having the choice or the understanding that you're ready to go on and leave this mortal or quasi mortal coil.

[E]

This episode is brought to you by FX's the Beauty Official podcast. Join host Evan Ross Katz on the official podcast for FX's hottest new series, the Beauty. Taking the scenes with its amazing stars as they discuss the show's most jaw dropping moments. Featuring Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, Ashton Kutcher, Rebecca Hall, Bella Hadid, Meghan Trainor Isabella Rossellini, Jessica Alexander and Ari Grayner Search Efex is the beauty wherever you listen to podcasts, he's also doing.

[C]

Sandras is also doing really interesting stuff here about how insistent all of our need to believe ourselves good is. Yes, Jill has this story about herself. Boone has this story about himself. We get to move around. Even the person who kills Jill believes that he is a good person and that what he did was justified. And that is radical in a way and very humane in a way. It doesn't let anybody off the hook. It doesn't rationalize or allow like yes, you can do these terrible things, you can kill someone and it's fine. But I think it helps with empathy and it helps with understanding. Right reasons, not excuses. As a shorthand that Saunders is very interested in how and why people end up the ways that we do. And this persistent need to believe that we are good, that each of us has, is part of that that's at play here.

[B]

Yeah, I was trying to make I'm not trying to make sense because I think we're both in the same space of like trying to say something definitive about a judgment or position rather than looking at what questions Sanders is interested in asking, posing and exploring. But it does seem there is some movement for the immortal soul of the person to move at the end or shortly thereafter. We get the point of view of the Frenchman. We don't know when his sort of conversion story was where he realizes and wants to be an advocate for some kind of reckoning or some kind of holding to account. And then Boone himself makes a move towards some other understanding, kind of in the Frenchman's mold of I don't want to be drug around by these two demons. It's painful, but I also don't want to be a part of their ideology either. I'm interested in then doing what I can here when it's already too late. And that Saunders makes space for that move is interesting to me. I don't know what to make of it because it doesn't suggest that it's either the point nor is it meaningless and it's somewhere in between and I don't have a good sense of that. Rebecca, what are you doing with this post death conversion to, I guess my political way of seeing the world or like the book's way of seeing the world.

[C]

I just think it's bigger than the politics. Like the easy reading of this book is that it's a climate novel that Saunders is indicting the people who are responsible for climate or maybe he's not indicting them enough. And that's what some of the reviewers are mad about. They think that he's let them off the hook. But Boone comes around to Jill in the end and says, I got swept up. And she says, in. And he says, me, myself.

[B]

Is that. That's not Buddhist, right? That's probably not Buddhist at all. That recognition.

[C]

Pretty Buddhist. A couple pages before that is the. The line, the self is the culprit. I mean, yeah, I've had enough Buddhist experience to, you know, exposure, I guess, to. To recognize those things that are happening here. And I. I think that Sanders is nudging us towards that, towards thinking about things that are bigger than ourselves. And climate change is the one that we have. That's most obvious right now. But there are other characters that we hear about, their bad behavior, too, that were part of other negative things in the world. And there will. There are so many of them happening right now. Like, there's a version of this novel to be written about ICE agents, you.

[B]

Know, well, it's whatever systemic bad thing you want to put. Yeah, Climate is maybe the most pressing and totalizing and complicated, which gives him a lot of room to run and play the word explore.

[C]

Yes, yes. And there's a lot to be done there. But I think you kind of could yank climate out of this story and put in any other major political, social issue. Right.

[B]

I think that's important. I think it's important that he's not a single. Like I said, he's not a sort of a lone actor of badness. Yes. That he's part of this thing, and he gets a lot of social commendation for it. And it accrues. He got swept up, but he also sort of got sedimentary, like, encased. And I think that's another thing Saunders is interested in here, is like, at what point would it have seemed reasonable, possible, and even human for Boone to pull the ripcord on his worldview and say, you know what? Actually, guys. And I can see some people saying, well, if you don't. If you didn't do it right, he did it wrong. But I think Sanders is much more. I think he sees the way to a better world is through that reality rather than around that reality, if that makes sense.

[C]

Yeah. I think that Sanders is deeply practical in a way, and is not out there making.

[B]

Which is a weird thing to say about practice, but I agree with you.

[C]

It is like, that's the sensibility that I think comes through here, is that Saunders, I think, shares our political Leanings here on the Book Riot podcast. And he is not out there saying we have to create a world where none of these things happen. I think he is in the place of radical acceptance that whatever version of the world has humans in it is going to have.

[B]

The poor will be with us, as always.

[C]

Yes, some morally bad actors, some bad things will be going on. And so if you are practicing radical acceptance of that, that is the. That's the reality we live in.

[D]

What.

[C]

Where do you go from there? And the only way through that is through, you know, the only way to solve it is to reckon with it rather than to try to like, convince yourself that if we just do magical things, we can win an election with a 100% landslide on one side or something like that. Yeah, he's not, he's not going for that. And I think he just sees humans limitations, that we all have limitations somewhere. And he is also wondering what the capacity for changes and if or how that capacity or limitation is related to a person being held accountable. Like, there's this great bit near the end of the book where one of them is reflecting on what, like some character who's done bad things. Even his ability to alter or overturn such negative predispositions as existed in him had also been, I saw, predetermined, baked in, as it were. Yes. Even that his ability to improve himself by willing himself to do so was inherent, fixed, non negotiable, had been granted to, forced upon him at birth. Likewise, his ability to alter. His ability to alter his abilities. Likewise, his ability to alter. His ability to alter.

[B]

His ability to really go down.

[C]

His ability.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And I don't think that Sanders is saying all of us are limited, we can only change so much. But he's willing to dwell in the pot, in the reality that people have different capacities and like this idea maybe that we have, especially in liberalism, of like, everybody can change and everybody can change to the same ultimate end and.

[B]

Do it right now and according to my specific mandate, dictum and point talking points. Because I like, like I said before, I. There's a part of me that thinks this is. Again, we're going back to the college poll session. This idea of free will and it's like whatever you want to call it, I think there's a. A fairly good chance that from the Big bang, sort of everything was locked into places. Giant domino said, an infinitely complicated domino set that was going to fall. One I think there's a chance of that, but I don't also don't think I want to think that way. I don't think it's useful to me. But the thing that's different and the thing he enters in is there is a moment of change at the end or past the end. And this process of having his life, you know, this is your life. K.J. boone, of Seeing his mother and father scowl, of seeing his daughter, of seeing these people brought before him, that actually does accrue and it doesn't happen. There's no magic sentence you can say to him or anybody else say, you know what, guys? You, damn it if you're not right about this thing we were vehemently disagreeing about. It's an accrual of human moments and people he cares about directly close to him saying, you know what? I'm not so sure. Or what about. Or I was a part of this too and I had a change of heart. That was the thing that ultimately mattered. Not, not the tweet of some stranger.

[D]

Right.

[B]

And I think that's something to consider here too is like, what are the vectors of change and who has more maybe ability than they might think? It's probably not you and me to go against ExxonMobil, but there could be people in that retinue or maybe it's a chain of influence that leads itself towards that. But this idea that if you just say the right incantation to a stranger and they're going to believe you because we get, we get this person that this guy's been thinking about, this college kid with the gold hair. It was only part of his conversion. He, he said the right shibboleth, the right magic words that should have done it logically, rationally and emotionally still wasn't enough. It took the whole world to bring him to account.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Musk is kind of an interesting character to think about in this model of someone who has a big reputation, who's done a lot of damage, that like people make whole hobbies and part time jobs out of harassing him online and telling him what a bad person he is and then wondering why he doesn't change.

[B]

Why. Why isn't this working? Tesla Hater 69 right.

[C]

And the reality of it is that he is a person just like any of us and, and most of us are only likely to change through direct encounter with other people whose opinions we trust and who's like, who we have a reason to listen to. And I, I do think Saunders is getting at something of that. There's. I, unexpectedly, this is a little bit of a pivot But I unexpectedly spent a lot of time thinking about Gilead and Marilyn Robinson reading.

[B]

I got nothing for that. Why? No, no, I mean, that's not me wrong. I just. That's not a wavelength.

[C]

I mean, maybe some of it is just the like old men waiting to die at all. But there's a big wedding going on at the house next door and Jill spends a lot of her spirit time watching that and has this real tenderness for the human moments of it. Like, like some of it gives Scrooge watching the Christmas party with the ghost of Christmas past. But there's a like, oh, life, love, desire. I just couldn't get enough. And she has a moment of looking at people out in the world and saying, it was all so dear. And it made me think about Reverend Ames and I sure, I sure have loved this.

[B]

Oh my God, this world. Yeah, I mean, I, I agree. I thought the next door wedding party was fascinating. The, the. The hurly burly of a messy life because like, like it's. This is one of the moments where people get reflective and they become sentimental. But because she has this sort of extra sensory perception where she gets close to them and she can sort of like start to hear their thoughts and feelings and pick it up. It's messy. Like there's betrayals and misunderstandings and disappointed hopes and that only sort of serves as sort of a. A raspberry coulee to cut the sweetness of the raspberry. The wedding cake that is the wedding. And that only makes it more interesting and more alive and more eminent and more precious. And that's the thing she missed. Not the perfect moments at a romantic dinner or whatever. It's like the liveness of it is the liveness of it.

[C]

And that there's this big like community celebration and joy and beauty and music and dancing happening at the wedding and the couple that just got married running off to do it in the pantry and you know, just really wonderful, lively human stuff contrasted with this man who thought he had a great life, but he's alone in this room. His wife is there some of the time, but he's not surrounded. There's not a parade of mourners dropping by to be like, man, we're so sorry. We're gonna miss you. And I think that contrast felt really powerful. But the whole thing also just gives Saunders. There are so many playgrounds for him in the book and, and just down to like wonderful human stuff. Jill's grandma was notoriously gassy in real life. Yeah. And like her ghost shows up and gives A little fart just to let her know.

[B]

That's so Saunders. Like, that's the other piece of that. He's. He's so like, I don't know, embodied. Right. Like, even as he's like, the self is a trap is also. We fart. And that's funny and endearing and human at the same time.

[C]

Right. And. And like in the first scene when the Frenchman appears, he says something to Jill about like, well, being entirely transparent. And he's talking about the metaphorical version of transparent. And she goes, you are entirely. And they have this like, oh, ha ha, we're ghosts.

[B]

Like, yeah. And when. And when she is like exacting some sort of pain on the other ghost, she's realized she has this ability that I'm not really sure what to make of this non standard ability she has to inflict some sort of sensation on the other. We're just going to call them ghosts, even though I don't think that word is ever used by walking through them and imagining a torture and they feel it like he's just imagining different kinds of insane, improbable tortures.

[C]

She's like, this guy was bad and mean. And so when I passed through him, I. I held the thought of like shards of glass in my mind and I passed through his butthole and then he's like writhing around holding his butt.

[B]

Or I imagine their head being empty and concrete pours in and they're immobilized.

[C]

And that's the kind of stuff that, like, it could be juvenile and in most other hands it would not work. But in Saunders, you're just like, it's lovely and so funny and somehow so human, like you want to get rid. It's like this afterlife version of I hope you step on a Lego, you know?

[B]

Right. Yes.

[C]

So, man, he's just so profoundly good.

[B]

One thing I was noticing, structurally, there are no chapter breaks. There's a couple of little, little like single, maybe double space that you get some sort of sense of transition. But it lends itself to a singular kind of, I think, reading experience. If you can do it quicker, the better you stay, I think because it is its own sort of dreamland, moral, ethical, spiritual universe. The more you can stay in it, probably the better. If you could drift with the book, to use specific rim language, which is a reference very few people are going to get. I think the exiting and entry, almost like the exiting and entry for her is disorienting the exiting and entering of this moral, spiritual, imaginative universe. I think you're best in like as few exits as you can do.

[C]

We had such good timing for this because I was snowed in on Saturday.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[C]

It's like, oh, George, baby, it's me and you. And I just sat down on the couch and all I did was read George Saunders and make soup. And you just. You're right. Like you do want to just let your headspace stay as enveloped as possible in the worlds of these books.

[B]

I built that in. I actually just read it last night because I had a long chunk of time to myself. I had gave myself three hours at 172 pages. I didn't need that much. But I was like, I just want to sit with this. I think this is one where certainly thinking about it, some kinds of books more or less are load bearing for thinking and interpreting and sort of dwelling in. And Saunders is always one where the longer it's not like a hot tub, we have to get out for 15 minutes. Like you want to stay in there longer, you've got to prune up when you're reading the Saunders and let the water.

[C]

And I feel like Saunders would love that. We're like, your book is a hot tub.

[B]

A hot tub. It's a magic hot tub that doesn't give you heart attacks or Legionnaires disease. And prunes or pruning fingers are good. I'm not sure what else. Rebecca, I think we've kind of done what we want to say. Is there anything else you had in your chopping block?

[C]

I'm trying, honestly, just so relieved that you also loved it. Because after I read those reviews this morning, I was like, I'm going to be so sad if we get on here and Jeff hates this and we. I mean, I don't mind if we have differences of opinion, but this feels. Saunders feels deeper to me.

[B]

All things are possible in the world of books and reading, but I'm not sure there's anyone. If there's a draft of authors and what I'm picking for is I will find them intriguing, interesting and thinky.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, maybe Percival Everett it. I mean, just to the people I can think. But I think I probably take Sanders number one. I think if you're saying you're going to have a bunch of interesting, conflicted things to say and you're going to feel like it opens up more than it closes down, I think Sanders is it.

[C]

It's a great way to put it in the Oishi language. Like this is a psychologically rich reading experience.

[B]

Yeah. It's even a book about. I Mean, I think that's another thing that's even a book about being psychologically rich because it gets swept on itself. Like there's a certain element in which his life, life and even his achievements are sort of boring, right? Like they go out of their way to say, I flew first class to all these places and I was in these country clubs and I kept thinking, I guess some people like that. I mean, I like to travel and everything, but like there's a version of that. Like, that's just, it's kind of like the, the thing I think about now that my kids are approaching high school age, about like at least since the 50s, every high school rebellion has kind of looked the same. It's like you party and do drugs and like you touch each other when people don't, your parents don't want you to. It's like everyone rebels in the same way. Like, isn't that funny? Like, yeah, everyone, everyone's vision of power and prestige is sort of the same. Everyone wants to be an actor or a celebrity for the same reasons. How boring that is.

[C]

It is boring and one dimensional. And there's a, there's some Oliver Berkman sensibility too, which I guess, like is also kind of Buddhist adjacent of like, you're gonna die someday, right? And what's actually going to matter? And if anything, that, that's, that's. The book is an invitation to question that for yourself. Of like, should you find yourself on your deathbed, how do we feel about that? How do we feel about the life that we've lived? And would the first class plane tickets have mattered? Or is there a better use of your time?

[B]

I mean I. In the Morgan household book, I was talking about last week, the artist spending money. They talk about cv. Thinking about your life in terms of a CV versus an obituary. So of course that's very.

[C]

Oh yeah. Resume values versus eulogy values.

[B]

And like, of course this wasn't brought up here, but. But of course this guy's first line of obituary is going to be about climate change in the petroleum industry. And boy, doesn't we all feel some kind of way about that? Where he imagines his life to have been a sort of Horatio Alger. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and look, he keeps saying, look what? Look what I did, Ma. Look what I did. Look what I did.

[C]

Everybody can drive wherever they want now and thank you, K.J.

[D]

Boone.

[B]

Yeah, and there's a part of that's right, but there's other. He just wants people to say, you really did something fella. And how elemental and simple it kind of is. At some level. It's just like that was the easiest. Just that was an available pathway for him to be affirmed as having value. And I was like, boy, when it comes down to it, it's. It's kind of that again, always. And already.

[C]

Yep. Man. So good. Go read.

[B]

So fun. Yeah. 172 pages. Not hard to get through. A real great one to have in the clubhouse as we get 2026 as year in books and reading started in earnest.

[C]

Yeah. And if you have not done Lincoln in the Bardo, you won't be sad about pairing them up.

[B]

Yeah. If you were to do one or the other first. If you haven't done Saunders or the other. I still kind of think 10th of December. I still feel like the short story is the way.

[C]

If you've never done Saunders, I think 10th of December is the entry point for sure.

[B]

But this is a very approachable one. Yeah. It very much is a grandma trying to lure children into her house of simplicity with the angel falls down and sort of guiding. Like, there's a Mitch Albom version of this that's indescribably unbearable. And it's so funny to think of that version.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's so interesting. Like, it never occurred to me to think of them as angels. And one of. Maybe it was the Garner review. One of them referred to Jill and her ilk as angels. Like, maybe it's because they felt so Dickens y to me that they felt like ghosts, spirits and spirits. And certainly in Lincoln and the Bardo they feel like spirits. I think angels is a misreading.

[B]

Well, and remember, there's. Yeah, they're very much. Because as far as it's been a while since I did the whole Bible and understood all of it, which means never. But like. Like angels don't have this idea of being in sort of an emotional purgatory, which these people are like, they've got something else to. Angels are just angels. They are not people that were alive once. Right. Those are saints. But. But they don't have this purview. And there are no ghosts in the Judeo Christian worldview as we talked about with Christmas Carol. So this is outside of.

[C]

Yeah, it's not any one.

[B]

It's not any one. It's any one thing. There's an even. I thought that there was some other Bible verse that just came to mind and flew out of my head. That's the distance from the pew and my age colliding there at One moment, moment. Rebecca. Thank you. Show notes, bookright.com list and go check out 02. Well, read the Patreon. I'm posting it just a little bit. Is the hot list. Check in for January 2026 in this here feed. And we're doing a little bit traveling, moving around, but the it books of February are going to come out midweek next week. You still have a couple days to vote in the winter preview draft. That is also a Patreon members only situation over there. We did not. I don't remember who got Vigil. Did I? Did you? Who took Vigil?

[C]

You got it. You got Vigil.

[B]

I'm really happy about that today for me. I mean, I get me any votes, but I'm happy for you.

[C]

I'm happy for that for you, too. We can fight over it again in our fantasy book draft.

[B]

I mean, we could do that real quick. Best of the year, I think it's all the things that it could be available for. It's going to be available.

[C]

Yeah. If there's a list, Vigil is a contender.

[B]

Yeah. All right.

[D]

Right.

[B]

Maybe not for Dwight Carter, but he got it wrong. As Rebecca established, he's on my list. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Rebecca.

[F]

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[C]

Com.