George Saunders' 'Vigil' is a brief and bumpy return to the Bardo

"If Heaven, according to Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next."

"In Saunders' rendering, the Lincoln Pieta sits at the center of a crowd of Bardo dwellers: cracking crude jokes, demanding attention, exuding empathy, nastiness, indifference in short, dead people behaving like exaggerated versions of their living selves. The enlightenment that some of these dead achieve is what the novel also delivered for many of us readers: a deepened sense, however momentary, of the mystery of Existence."

"Vigil is a briefer and bumpier return visit back to the Bardo. Instead of the mythic grief of Lincoln, here we have the passing of one somewhat mundane, if contemptible, human being. K.J. Boone was and for a few more hours, still is an oil company CEO. To Boone, corporate greed and fossil fuels power the engine of American capitalism and he sees nothing wrong with the way things are. In fact, to keep profits soaring, he went so far as to falsify facts about scientific research."

The Bardo is portrayed as a frenetic, crowded afterlife where a person's self-awareness influences their next existence. A graveside scene centers on Abraham Lincoln cradling his 11-year-old son Willie, with the mausoleum inhabited by Bardo dwellers who mimic exaggerated versions of their living selves through crude jokes, demands for attention, empathy, nastiness, and indifference. Some dead achieve enlightenment, offering a heightened sense of existence's mystery. Vigil returns to the Bardo focusing on K.J. Boone, an oil company CEO guilty of falsifying scientific research to boost profits. A spiritual facilitator, Jill 'Doll' Blaine, descends to comfort the newly dead.

Read at www.npr.org