Unfortunately, George Saunders’ Vigil, was a big disappointment for me. I went into this book with a lot of anticipation. I’ve been a longtime fan of Saunders, and Lincoln in the Bardo is one of my all-time favorite audiobooks. I still think about it nearly a decade later. It was one of those rare listening experiences that felt more like a performance than a traditional book—layered, immersive, and emotionally powerful, with dozens of narrators creating this chorus-like world between life and death.
So when I saw Vigil coming out, I didn’t even hesitate. I downloaded it immediately. I went in expecting something similarly original or at least emotionally surprising. Instead, I found myself feeling… underwhelmed.
To be fair, I decided to listen to it as an audiobook specifically because Lincoln in the Bardo worked so well in that format for me. And I will say, Judy Greer—who narrates Vigil—is excellent. I really like her work, and this is not a performance issue. It just didn’t land.
At a certain point, fairly early on, I actually laughed out loud—not because something was funny, but because I realized how familiar the core concept felt. Once again, we are in that liminal space between life and death. The in-between. The not-quite-here and not-quite-gone.
Now, Vigil is not identical to Lincoln in the Bardo. It is more contained, more focused on a small set of characters rather than a chorus of voices. It’s set in a more contemporary world. But structurally and thematically, it carries a very similar DNA: the idea of consciousness suspended between states, the dying and the living overlapping in some unresolved middle space.
And I just had this moment of thinking—oh, we’re doing this again. There was another moment, later in the book, where I genuinely laughed again. Not out of delight, but out of disbelief at where the narrative was going.
The story begins to fold in this idea of a Scrooge McDuck-like figure on his deathbed, mixed with climate change commentary. And I remember just sitting there thinking… what am I listening to? To be fair, Vigil is clearly trying to do something unusual. It’s quirky, ambitious, and intentionally strange. There are ideas in it that feel like they’re reaching for something larger than the story itself.
And, as always with George Saunders, there are moments of beautiful writing. He has a way with language that occasionally stops you mid-thought. There are lines that feel precise, poetic, and emotionally sharp in isolation. But as a whole, the book just didn’t come together for me.
I kept waiting for a deeper emotional grounding or a moment where everything clicked into place in a meaningful way, and instead I mostly felt distance from it. Ultimately, I walked away feeling disappointed.
Simply, I didn’t connect with this story. I can absolutely see how other readers might connect with it, or even love it, especially if Lincoln in the Bardo resonated deeply for them in the same way it did for me. But Vigil just didn’t reach me in that same place.