Vigil is a book that, with astounding brevity, delves into one of the main issues of modern life, our reliance on oil and the impact the oil industry has had on the world as well as the complexities of how it damages the environment while also being essential to maintaining society as it currently functions. This book gravitates around a dying man, K.J. Boone, who is largely responsible for the oil industry’s success and impact. But Vigil is not a portrait of one man with a wide-angle lens. It is a portrait of humanity, and the camera zooms in and shifts focus, and zooms in even more. At points, it focuses the lens directly on its reader at close range, like a mirror, and suggests they take an honest look. And just when you think you have seen the whole picture and formed your opinion, Saunders challenges that opinion and re-frames the image. This book is full of keen, searing insights and big ideas woven into a compelling story full of a vivid cast of characters so well realized you will hate them, cry for them, want to shake them and yell at them and hug them and mourn for them. But most of all, Saunders presents these characters from a place of open-minded understanding and humanity. He sees them and writes them in full color, no character is all good or all evil; not CEOs in the oil industry, not our narrator who, when confronted with the more than questionable morality of her charge, longs to escape to her old life, and not the reader who may find that they relate to some of the shortcomings of these characters. Vigil explores and exposes the morally grey in all of us, the hungers and fears that drive our actions and inactions, and juxtaposes all of the tiny wonderful things in life with the ways in which we threaten the possibility of those very things by avoiding direct eye contact with this out of control monster we have all had a hand in creating and refer to as society.
Vigil by George Saunders, (List Price: $28, Random House, 9780525509622, January 2026)
Reviewed by Savannah Laughlin, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina
