Now that Toni Morrison has passed, and with apologies to Alice McDermott and Bruce Springsteen, a compelling argument can be made that George Saunders is now the greatest living American Catholic writer.
His place among the best living American writers is secure. He was recently awarded the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, having previously won the Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, the PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Story Prize, as well as fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim, Lannan and MacArthur Foundations. He is also a New York Times best-selling author in multiple genres.
While Saunders is not often included in discussions of the best Catholic writers, in both his upbringing and his thematic concerns, his work fits solidly in the Catholic literary tradition.
Saunders is now a practicing Buddhist, but he grew up Catholic and often cites the significance of his Catholic formation on how he understands the world. In 2013, he told The Awl:
I loved growing up Catholic…. They expected you to understand that there are truths that are not overt, but implied, and that the best way to imply that kind of truth is through metaphor and ritual. I think that once you get immersed in that kind of beauty, and really feel it, even once, you will always be looking for that.
He expanded on this idea in a conversation with Image in 2016, saying: “I was raised in parochial schools…. I think I’ve always had a need, because of that intense period, for mystery and metaphor and beauty—really because of the power of the Catholic Mass. Catholicism was central to my way of thinking and being in the world—a moral system and an aesthetic system.”
As recently as January of this year, he was telling The New York Times about the importance of his childhood Catholicism on forming his moral imagination, and particularly his desire to understand people’s motives and to resist simplistic and reductive judgment. Catholicism also oriented him toward an understanding of the world that transcends simplistic biological determinism. As he told Image:
[We] think that it just so happens that in this generation we are fully equipped to know all that there is, and that we can know it logically and via the senses, period. And this inclination leads us to be very rational and data-reliant and pragmatic and mystery-denying—and yet mystery is real. We have no satisfactory answers for any of the biggest questions.
Startling and Perplexing
One approach Saunders employs to shake up both characters and readers alike is to unsettle us with the bizarre premises of his stories. In this, his approach is reminiscent of that of Flannery O’Connor, who famously declared that to reach a hostile or indifferent audience, “you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” In Saunders’s fiction, readers are continually confronted by perplexing scenarios, and given little guidance to help orient themselves as to what is actually going on.
Part of the joy of reading a Saunders story is the gradual process of coming to understand, for instance, why human beings are being used as lawn ornaments or wall art, or why people seem to be living fulltime in weird theme parks, or why sentient Twinkies are running amok. His latest work, the novel Vigil, begins with the narrator plummeting out of the sky and then landing with her partially clothed upper torso fully embedded in the earth. Even for Saunders, it is a strange beginning.
The Lingering Souls of the Dead
We quickly come to learn that the narrator is a ghost who has been sent to comfort a man on his deathbed. This puts any reader already conversant with Saunders’s work on relatively familiar ground, because George Saunders loves ghost stories—not the kind intended to scare readers, but ones in which ghosts are central and often sympathetic characters, providing a glimpse into the spiritual nature of existence.
There are two distinct types of ghosts who regularly appear in his fiction: First there are the souls of the recently dead, who are gifted with a sort of mystical insight in the moments immediately after death, and who are on their way to whatever lies beyond the mortal realm. We see this type of ghost at the end of some of his best stories, including “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “CommComm” and “Escape From Spiderhead.”
Then there are the lingering souls of the dead who are stuck, unwilling or unable to move on to whatever is next. This is the state of most of the characters in Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’s masterful first novel, though we also see ghosts of this type in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” in the Civil War-era family that haunt the grounds of the park, and in “CommComm,” where the ghosts of the narrator’s parents, murdered during a home invasion, linger on in their house, unaware that they are dead.
In all of these instances, Saunders uses his ghostly characters to explore questions of meaning and value, truth and goodness, sin and transcendence. In this, his ghost stories are less like the work of, say, Shirley Jackson or Stephen King than they are of Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, where the presence of ghosts is intended to edify or transform both the characters in the story and the reader. Indeed, Vigil bears more than a passing resemblance to A Christmas Carol, which Saunders declared on his popular Substack newsletter Story Club to be his “favorite book of all-time.”
Saunders explains that he loves Dickens’s classic story so much because it explores “what (as the years pass) seems to be the dominant question of western culture, or maybe any culture: Why is it that some people get everything and others get not much at all? What are we to make of this? The miracle of the book is that it takes on this deep, dark, potentially lecture-laden topic, and makes it so much fun.”
A New Take on a Classic
Vigil does something similar; it uses the visits of multiple ghosts to interrogate the nature of power and influence, and grace and salvation, and it is a very fun, quick read. There is a kind of manic energy to the various ghosts that appear, and Saunders leads us on some very strange, and very amusing, excursions away from the deathbed. But instead of centering Scrooge’s human perspective on the various ghosts, Vigil’s point of view comes from one particular ghost: Jill “Doll” Blaine, who is attempting to provide comfort to a dying oil executive named K. J. Boone.
Boone, like Scrooge, is rich, but unlike Scrooge he is not isolated—he has a wife and daughter who love and comfort him in his final hours—and he seems to have fully enjoyed his wealth and his power. While Scrooge’s death plays a key role in the fourth section of A Christmas Carol, he is not actually on his deathbed, and indeed, he is able to put off his death by changing his ways. When Vigil begins, Boone has only hours to live, and it is clear that he cannot escape his fate. The key question of the novel then becomes not if he will change, but if he will accept that he was wrong in how he lived.
One of Jill’s ghostly powers is the ability to enter into the sphere of other people’s thoughts. When Jill first approaches Boone, she notes his supreme sense of self-satisfaction:
I scanned for doubts regarding things he had done or left undone; things he might have said but had not; mistakes to which he had not yet fully admitted, any of which might keep him from attaining that state of total peace so to be desired at this juncture.
And found nothing, or nearly nothing.
He was as sure of himself as ever a charge of mine had been.
Jill believes that this facade of surety will begin to crack once Boone begins to die, and that it is her role to provide comfort “in whatever way I might”—which, in her understanding of existence, means to champion a sort of fatalistic determinism, to reassure her charge that he was “an inevitable occurrence, upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment” (emphasis in original).
There is another ghost who visits Boone on his deathbed, though, and he is there to keep Boone from moving peacefully on to the next realm. He tells Jill, “To comfort one who remains willfully ignorant of what he has done is to provide no comfort at all…. If you truly wish to comfort him, bring him to admit his sin, then repent it.”
This nameless ghost is the inventor of some form of combustion engine (he is a 19th-century Frenchman, so I suspect he is Étienne Lenoir, who is credited with inventing the internal combustion engine in 1848) and is wracked by guilt over the role his invention went on to play in global warming. While Jill wants to provide comfort through the idea of guiltless fatalism, he tells Jill this is “facile”: “Tell me, do you believe it? … The guilty are innocent, the sinner and the saint may both sit at the right hand of the Father, enjoying equal portions?”
Our understanding of what exactly K. J. Boone has been guilty of expands as the novel moves along. At first we simply see him as a powerful oil executive (which would be reason enough for guilt), but we later learn that he set up and funded multiple think tanks devoted to denying climate change, and then later still we discover that he wrote and delivered an influential address called the “Aarhus speech”—which is described as “‘one of the most irresponsible speeches any American has ever delivered’” and which his co-writer later called a sin “against the world, and against God”—which ended any chance that the United States would transition away from using fossil fuels.
By the end of the novel, Saunders has given the reader the impression that no single person in history has done as much to contribute to the ongoing climate disaster as K. J. Boone. He also shows us, in increasingly vivid ways, how this disaster is unfolding across the globe. At first we see the various swings of extreme temperature experienced by a schoolgirl in Pennsylvania; later we witness an invasion by the ghosts of countless bird species that have been decimated by climate change; toward the end of the novel we meet a man from India who was killed along with his family as a result of severe drought.
It is in light of these tragedies that the anonymous ghost wants Boone to admit to and repent of his own role in the ongoing climate catastrophe, and over the course of the novel he goes to great lengths to get Boone and Jill (and the reader) to understand the scope of the problem and the depth of Boone’s complicity in it.
Jill, who died in 1976 at age 22, was unaware that any of this was happening, and she is horrified; she is even more appalled once she learns that Boone is entirely aware of all of it, and feels no remorse over his role in it. The main conflict of the novel hinges on whether or not he will accept that his actions were wrong, though we also follow Jill’s crisis of faith over what she sees as her calling.
A Challenge to Moral Generosity
Saunders is a compelling writer because his work focuses on the strange movement of grace, and his stories continually approach questions of redemption and salvation in surprising and fresh ways. I will not spoil how this all plays out in Vigil, but I will confess that I found it hard to get too invested in the possible redemption of this particular individual.
I am writing this in a week when the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would no longer count the cost to human lives when considering air pollution standards, and when we learned that U.S. carbon emissions had once again started to climb this past year. I find that I do not particularly care if a rich oil executive, the man apparently singularly responsible for both the governmental and industrial denial of climate change, is saved.
This is surely part of Saunders’s point—he wants to present us with an extreme case. If we say we believe in redemption, forgiveness and grace, Vigil asks us, “Even here?” Saunders, after all, is the author of nonfiction essays like “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” and “The Great Divider,” where he embedded with the Border Patrol, pieces in which he goes to places filled with people he is in complete disagreement with and tries to understand where they are coming from—not to excuse them, or to erase the differences, but because he believes we cannot exist as a society if we do not at least attempt to understand one another.
But I found that Vigil ran up against the limits of my own moral generosity. Reading the novel led me back to a conversation reported in Interview in 2017 between Saunders and Zadie Smith, in which they discussed, among other things, A Christmas Carol and the power of ghosts in fiction. Smith argues:
[A] ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element. For example, I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money. All true. But by the end of it, you could also see that there’s also a kind of a sentimental protection of capital, right? Because in the end, everybody gets to keep their money. The poor stay poor. Scrooge just gets to feel better about himself. And all is right with the world.… [This] has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois…. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
Saunders mostly agrees, and then says, “there are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that’s okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained? If that’s the case, wa-hoo, you know? Wa-hoo.”
I am not sure I am entirely satisfied with the ways in which Vigil wraps up the various moral issues that it raises; but my own uncertainty, and the fact that I keep tossing them over in my mind, speaks to the deftness with which Saunders presents them. And I am certain that I enjoyed spending time with Jill “Doll” Blaine and the various other ghosts who populate this short, provocative novel, as well as wrestling alongside them with the weighty questions that Saunders weaves into this compelling ghost story. Wa-hoo.
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