In ‘Vigil,’ George Saunders Asks: Can An Oil CEO Repent?
The author’s second novel treats executive decision-making not as backdrop, but as the moral engine of the story.
Illustration: Fabien Corre for Bloomberg
Most executives picking up a contemporary novel — including many reading this review — would struggle to recognize themselves in its pages. Serious fiction often treats high-status jobs as minimally viable products, assembled from clichés cribbed from Succession or Billions and a sheepish fact-check call to a banker friend from Yale. Novels tend not to want to engage with actual work (boring!) but with wealth, inequality and the emptiness of the soul that privilege causes — or has caused.
George Saunders’s new novel, Vigil, (Jan. 27, Random House) is a rare work of literary fiction that puts that future-pushing, corner-cutting, world-shaping actual work in the foreground.