37. vigil - george saunders āļøāļøāļøāļø
this is my first george saunders and oh, the descriptive prowess. page twenty-one contained one of the most delightfully written descriptions of children i have encountered in a long time, and a few pages later, an errant line of description punched me in the gut with its sheer simplicity and accuracy of feeling (āI am back to learning again among my summer-changed friendsā to describe the start of another school year). summer-changed. yes. hot damn.
starting about a quarter of the way into the book, though, i increasingly began to wonder, to what end are all of these powers of literary description bent? who am i supposed to sympathize with here, among these characters? is sympathy even the point? is empathy, or, rather, its lack? is it a parable? a psychological exploration of antisocial immorality and its self-justifications? its rationalizations? for whom, thenāwhat intended audience? or is the point simply depiction by way of ghostly literary conceit? i wasnāt sure where saunders was taking me.
and, in the end, it was somewhere a bit middling. this novel asked what posed as deep philosophical questionsādo any of us have any agency at all? is everything we do, every attempt at betterment, futile? arenāt we all inevitably the way we are? isnāt it right, then, that jill herself does not change, but continues insisting on her own elevation, her own ability to provide comfort, even in the face of her obvious failure to do so? isnāt she just as inevitable as the rest of us?
to which my answer is: okay, sure. but did i need to spend 174 pages beside the deathbed of a hateful oil executive to ask those questions? and did this novel move me, alter my relationship to those questions or the impossibility of answering them? no. not really. mostly i feel a bit resentful at having spent that many pages by that particular deathbed, and wondering what the novel was really trying to do by inviting me to sit there.
so: on the level of craft, this was immaculate. this book is undeniably saved by its own prose. the story that craft serves? fine, if not mediocre. i find i am neither more elevated, nor more comforted, than when i began.
