Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to confront his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost from the 1940s to join, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are, in fact, here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful,” he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”
Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in doing so, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more…” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting.” He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly—and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy—on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him, and he worries that he is not prepared for it.
About 25 years ago, Saunders was on a passenger plane that was hit by geese shortly after taking off from Chicago. There was a loud bang, the plane began making terrible noises, black smoke filled the cabin, people screamed, the lights of the city appeared to approach very fast, and Saunders believed he was going to die. At the time he was “at peak spirituality,” a Tibetan Buddhist who meditated for three hours a day, and yet he experienced pure terror. “It was like all the elements of my identity got rolled back. I wasn’t thinking about writing. I wasn’t even able to think about my family; there was just some primal self that was about to be lost,” he recalls.
“And then this funny, I don’t know…” he trails off for a moment, apparently unsure if “funny” is the right word, before telling me that the teenage boy next to him asked: “Sir, is this supposed to be happening?” and he, his fatherly instinct kicking in, replied with bravado: “Yes, of course.” It is a funny story—Saunders puts on voices to tell it—and he deploys it the way he uses humor in his fiction, to temper the earnestness and moral seriousness of what he is trying to convey.
The plane landed safely in Chicago, and for about a week after, Saunders felt euphoric. Buddhists believe that a true awareness of one’s own mortality enables a person to fully embrace the wonder of being alive. “It’s almost like if you were invited to a really wonderful party and it was going to end at 11:30 and they let you know that—it would change the quality, as opposed to: this is a six-day party, or an infinite party,” he says. He has had “flare-ups” of that feeling since, and he chases it in his writing.
“If you’d seen the stuff I was writing at 25, you’d never think that person would be published. You’d feel sorry for them.” Saunders won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2006 and is perhaps best known for his short stories. He has published five collections and a couple of novellas, which are dark and satirical, often set in fantastical, dystopian worlds—strange theme parks or malls or futuristic prisons—that present American society through a fun-house mirror, magnifying its most grotesque, absurd, and spirit-crushing features. They are compassionate stories, told by a man whose advice to students—a 2013 commencemGeorge Saunders’ commencement speech on regretting “failures of kindness” and his mid-pandemic letter on the importance of bearing witness often go viral. He sees writing as a “sacramental act” and holds the passionate, optimistic belief that literature can make us better people. This is because it requires both writer and reader to transcend themselves and their baser instincts, exercising their capacity for reflection and empathy. Just as in meditation he might visualize a loved one being swept down a river to generate compassion—then expanding that feeling outward to all people—he finds that writing enables him to expand his empathy. It leads him to what he calls “a certain view of things in which everyone is just me on a different day, or in a different life.”
In Lincoln in the Bardo and Vigil, ghosts can practice empathy in the most direct, literal way by stepping into each other’s minds. Vigil is told from the perspective of Jill Blaine, the ghost of a sweet-natured, 22-year-old newlywed killed in a car bomb explosion, who then enters the mind of her killer. Her moral purpose is to comfort the dying, and she calls her guiding philosophy “elevation”—the view that our lives, with all our failures and triumphs, were inevitable, shaped by forces beyond our control. “Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?” she asks KJ Boone, the oil tycoon. “All your life you believed yourself to be making choices, but what looked like choices were so severely limited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon you that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish imprisonment.” Is she right? Saunders says he hasn’t decided and believes good fiction should aim to ask the right questions rather than provide answers. “My job is to be the rollercoaster designer and try to set the elements up so it produces the maximum amount of ‘wow’… My feeling is always to err on the side of ‘what makes sparks fly,’ and then the meaning is kind of secondary.”
But Saunders does remember being six or seven years old and thinking, when someone told him “oh, you’re such a good boy,” that “I didn’t choose any of those things, that’s just the way I am.” He recalls an even earlier memory, at three or four, knocking over a coffee pot and scalding his sister, and later worrying about whether he had done it on purpose. He has always been “neurotic” and “OCD” (though not officially diagnosed) and refers to these looping, self-interrogating thoughts as his “monkey mind.” Writing is a “mental health thing” for him; it quiets the monkey mind.
He grew up in Oak Forest, south Chicago, where his father worked for a coal company and later owned and ran a fried-chicken franchise called Chicken Unlimited. He was an “errant” reader, devouring the eclectic mix of books his father left for him before work, which included Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Other America, an exposé of American poverty by socialist writer Michael Harrington. He attended the Colorado School of Mines to study geophysical engineering and read in his spare time but had “no taste.” “Ayn Rand was the only novelist I really liked for a while, and I didn’t detect anything false in it. Because I was so young I thought: ‘Well, that’s how it is,'” he says.
After college, he worked with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra and wrote fiction in his spare time, trying to emulate Hemingway. “If you had seen the stuff I was writing at 25, you would never think that person would be published. You would feel sorry for them,” he says. In his telling, he was redeemed by an unearned arrogance. “I think this is true, and it is even a compositional principle…””If you say ‘I’m going to do this,’ and then you don’t allow yourself to be discouraged by the things that should discourage you, eventually the problem resolves itself,” he says.
A few years after returning from Asia, while living what he calls a “nicely out-of-control life” in Texas, he wrote a story unlike anything he’d done before. It was inspired by a dream about a theme park without gravity. A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room was published by the Northwest Review and helped him secure a funded MFA at Syracuse University in upstate New York. His first weeks there were spent sleeping in a truck.
At Syracuse, he met novelist Paula Redick. He fell in love so quickly and completely that they were engaged within three weeks and married less than a year later. They have two grown daughters and live together in LA with their 13-year-old dog, Guin. “It’s such a nice life,” he says sincerely. He and Paula write in separate offices, meet for lunch, walk the dog, and serve as each other’s first readers—though he admits she’s better at it. He knows if a story doesn’t evoke a strong emotional reaction from her, it’s not ready. They push each other to create work with spiritual weight. “It’s not enough to be clever or sarcastic; we want that undercurrent of something deeper,” he says.
How did he know she was the one so quickly? “The word that comes to mind is undeniable: I cannot not get on that boat,” he says. He found her “very deep.” Both were raised in religious families—he was a “really rabid Catholic kid,” she came from a “kind of fundamentalist” background—and they remain very “spiritual.” “We have that at our core: are we at all moving towards being better people and more ready for the end?” Plus, he adds, Paula was “so beautiful.” Zadie Smith once joked that in old photos, George—very blonde and hairy, with a mullet and a mustache—looked like he was abducting Paula.
When Paula became pregnant and went into labor at four months, forcing her onto bed rest to save the baby, Saunders completed his degree by correspondence. He calls his thesis “crap,” saying he labored under the misconception that he needed to produce Serious Literature, reverting to lifeless, derivative prose. After graduating, he took a job as a tech writer. During boring work calls, he’d doodle and compose crude poems, cheered that they made Paula laugh. Eventually, he started writing short stories again, this time making them funny. In 1996, he published his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. A year later, he began teaching at Syracuse, where he remains a creative writing professor. “I often think that at that level, the difference between very, very good writing and great writing has to do with letting something into the mix that you’ve been holding back for complicated reasons.” For him, that was humor.
Saunders is an enthusiastic teacher. Since 2021, he has been running his Story Club Substack, which he updates bi-weekly to discuss craft. “I thought I’d do it for a year, but it turned out to be so much fun,” he says. It now has over 315,000 subscribers, with about 30,000 paying. “There’s something really non-internet-y about the comments. People are so smart and generous,” he says, finding it a “consolation” and a corrective to the political climate. Sometimes he wonders: “how does this impulse to kindness coexist with, say, ICE raids?”
“My nature is to be a peacemaker—but I don’t want to be a peacemaker for Trump’s regime.”
I had run into Saunders on the stairwell on the way to the interview.By the time we reached the second-floor landing, we had somehow drifted into a conversation about our shared fears regarding Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. “I keep thinking, ‘Well, the people won’t tolerate this,’ but people are tolerating it,” he says. Mostly, though, discussing such things just leaves him feeling “yucky.” “The person I am at a family party arguing about politics isn’t very interesting—just another old guy with opinions,” he admits, aware that many of his views are “robotic,” shaped by the media he consumes.
When writing fiction, however, he becomes a different creature politically, one compelled to consider multiple perspectives. “That person, through working every day, can become a slightly more interesting person—a little slower to judge, a little more confused, a little quieter,” he says. “That in itself made me think I don’t have to be so despairing about, say, the partisan political war, because we’re all just trapped in that lower mode. There is this possibility, however remote, that we could for brief periods ascend into that other mindset—and then it’s actually not so terrifying. Now, the problem is scale. I mean, if just one person does it, we’re still in trouble.”
He began writing Vigil out of curiosity about whether those who spent decades covering up climate change now have regrets, “given the weather.” The challenge—which he sees as a moral one—is to “see if you can imagine how this action, which to you seems so bad, can to that person seem good.” It’s partly a question of technical skill. “There’s a facile way to do it and a complex way to do it, and you can only find that out in the lines themselves,” he explains. “If you don’t do it right, it leads to a facile kind of sympathy, that kind of liberal thing where someone drives a spike through your head and you say, ‘Thank you for the coat rack.’” In other words, he didn’t want to portray the character KJ Boone sympathetically or suggest his actions were justified—but he did want to make him understandable, recognizably human, and complex, qualities we often fail to see in our adversaries during heated political arguments.
Saunders is still considering how, given his platform, he should address politics when he goes on tour for Vigil in February. “To preach to the converted in the familiar terms they’re used to feels a little too satisfying, like too much sugar. Whereas my nature is to be more of a peacemaker. But that’s dangerous right now because I don’t want to be a peacemaker for this regime,” he says.
For now, he has a few quiet months ahead—walking the dog, pondering potential new writing projects. “The one thing I’m doubling down on is: just keep creating fictional worlds. Improve the quality of your thought, improve the quality of your compassion through that sacramental exercise; then whatever you have to do, you’ll be better equipped,” he says. And then, inevitably, he adds the joke: “Also start weightlifting, build a machine-gun turret…”
Vigil by George Saunders will be published by Bloomsbury on January 27. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs George Saunders on How do you truly capture the reality of this moment
BeginnerLevel Questions
Q What is this piece by George Saunders about
A Its a reflective essay where Saunders uses the idea of ghosts and mortality to examine the feeling of living in America during the Trump presidency He asks how we can honestly understand and write about such a turbulent divisive time
Q What does he mean by ghosts here
A Hes not talking about literal spirits He uses ghosts as a metaphor for the pastour personal memories national history and the people who came before usand how they haunt and shape our present reality
Q Why is he thinking about mortality
A Confronting the fact that life is short and we will all die pushes him to ask what matters right now Its a way to cut through noise and distraction to see whats truly significant about the current political and social moment
Q Is this just a political essay
A Not exactly It uses the political climate as a starting point but its more about a deeper human question How do we as individuals and writers honestly perceive and represent our complex reality especially during times of crisis
Advanced Thematic Questions
Q How does Saunders connect the personal with the political
A He argues that to understand the largescale political reality we must first look inward Our personal fears memories and awareness of mortality are the lenses through which we see the world The national moment is felt through individual experience
Q Whats his answer to the title question How do you truly capture the reality of this moment
A He suggests theres no single answer but the attempt requires radical honesty empathy and a willingness to see beyond your own immediate perspective It involves listening to the ghosts and acknowledging your own biases and mortality to get closer to the truth
Q What is the role of the writer or artist according to this essay
A The role is to be a faithful compassionate witness Not to preach or provide easy answers but to describe the complexity of the human experience within the historical moment with as much clarity and kindness as possible
