Climate and Punishment

Climate change is a strange kind of crime. In some sense we are all guilty of it, and all still in the process of committing it. Our car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing and everything else are paid for in blood—contributing, every moment, to the suffering and destruction global warming brings. “The onus,” as the New York Times editorial board admonished its readers a few years ago, “is on society as a whole.”

In another sense, though, a few of us are far, far guiltier than the rest. Most of us, for instance, are not the oil company executives who were told about the effects of CO2 emissions back in the 1970s and decided that the threat to their business outweighed the threat to the planet. Most of us are not the politicians they funded to vote against emissions regulations, or the scientists who helped them by toning down the conclusions of federal climate commissions, or the PR consultants they hired to sow doubt about the subject. (As the climate litigation scholar Benjamin Franta has written, a central part of their strategy has been “shifting the blame” for pollution “onto consumers and society as a whole.”¹)

Most of us are not, say, Lee Raymond, the chairman and CEO of Exxon from 1993 to 2005, who called man-made climate change an “unproved theory” years after the company’s own research had confirmed it, who declared—in what Bill McKibben has called “the single most audacious speech of the era”—that trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense and lacks foundation in our current understanding of the climate system,” and who oversaw an elaborate campaign of misinformation and denial to prevent action from being taken. Most of us are not Duane LeVine, who in the late 1980s, as Exxon’s manager of strategy and science development, helped develop the “Exxon Position,” a plan to emphasize uncertainty and the “socio-political realities” around climate change in order to prevent a “crisis mentality” from taking hold. Most of us are not James Inhofe, the longest-serving senator in the history of Oklahoma (1994–2023), who chaired the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, received millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry, and called global warming a “hoax” and a “conspiracy” in speeches and books throughout his career.

In this sense, the destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it. Raymond, who retired from Exxon having been paid almost $700 million for his work, was eventually forced out of his leadership position on JPMorgan Chase’s board but allowed to remain on the board itself. That’s about as far as justice has gotten.

“You are poised to make a clean escape,” a very Raymond-like oil company CEO is told by a former colleague in George Saunders’s new novel, Vigil, as he lies on his deathbed. “You…were never proven wrong or publicly disgraced or forced to apologize…. You stand at the threshold of the next world, dear friend, victorious and unrebuked.” “Though the seas may rise,” another colleague advises him, “and the mountains turn to mud and subsume the farms and the forests burn and entire prairies be denuded and through sleeping cities race the very flames of Hell…admit no wrongdoing.”

Rebukes, apologies, public disgrace—it can feel, at the moment, like such things are possible only in our fantasies and in the group chats we hope the NSA never notices. Vigil is indeed a fantasy, set, like Saunders’s previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), in a world of spirits lingering on the edge of an obscurely ordered afterlife.² It is narrated by Jill “Doll” Blaine, a long-dead young woman who now visits the dying to help ease them into death, providing comfort and guidance as they find themselves “on the wrong side of a rapidly closing door.”

Her 343rd such “charge,” she discovers after she hurtles out of the sky and lands face-first in his driveway, is that oil company CEO: K.J. Boone, “a tiny, crimped fellow in an immense mahogany bed,” with “a steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, cours[ing] through him” despite the fact that “he was dying, for reasons unclear, in the least appealing room of his magnificent home.” Saunders has never gone in for unleavened rage. His books are full of the degradations wrought by capitalism—on people’s lives, their surroundings, even their words and thoughts—but just as full of humane complications and sudden outbreaks of redemption. Vigil is, characteristically, a fantasy not of justice or retribution but of the mere possibility of second thoughts.

It is a kind of Montessori Inferno, in which the spirit world descends to try to coax someone into, perhaps, eventually, at the last possible minute, admitting what he’s done. Shortly after Jill encounters Boone, other ghosts join her. The first and most persistent is a tattered Frenchman who, in life, invented the internal combustion engine—“to my shame”—and now wants Jill to help him bring Boone, “as quickly as possible, to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.” The Frenchman is soon joined by the spirits of those who worked with Boone, of his parents, and others, some of whom are seen only in memory—as in Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’s apparitions have the ability to transfer their own experiences to the living, or to other spirits, by passing into their bodies. (In Vigil, fittingly, doing so consumes the original memory—another all-too-finite resource.) As Boone reluctantly approaches death, these spirits hector and cajole him. He remains obstinately unrepentant, and Jill is buffeted between them, sometimes badgered into helping shame Boone, more often trying ineffectually to ward off his persecutors in the name of comfort, occasionally distracted by flickering memories of her own life or by the boisterous wedding that is taking place at the house next door.

“Even a great and beloved writer,” Saunders wrote in his newsletter, Story Club, earlier this year, “is going to show some range in the quality of his or her works.” Saunders, as he often does in Story Club, was talking about “my beloved Chekhov,” asking what might be learned by looking at a story “at the lower end” of his range, “The House with the Mezzanine”—concerned, as it happens, with “the futility of local action in the face of the larger, systemic, forces.”

It has to be said that Vigil, likewise, is at the lower end of Saunders’s range. It is brisk and charming, with that elegant, seemingly artless Saundersian way of stirring together wild metaphysical invention and slapstick mundanity, profanity and pathos and sudden stabs of horror. But much of it feels oddly out of focus. Jill’s devotion to her calling wavers now and then, her baroquely tragic death eventually emerges, yet she remains the same chipper, somewhat bland narrator we are introduced to on the first page.

Boone, similarly, is more often the idea of a Big Oil executive than a real person. Saunders clearly doesn’t want to turn him into a caricature, but the result is a man with few distinctive features. He is insecure about his height and his humble origins, defensive and arrogant about his work, dismissive of the “losers, trivial people” who question its worth. All this we might have assumed from the start. Saunders once worked on an oil rig, and a flashback to Boone’s early experiences on one brings him briefly to life:

Some dunce would be joking around, doing a comedy routine off the radio, not paying attention, about to get himself sucked into a gearbox, and he’d grab that bozo by the arm and yank him over somewhere safe and hiss a few harsh words into his ear there and give him a brotherly pop on the hard hat.

We see Boone’s first taste of leadership and get a glimpse of the tough-talking sentimentality with which he views himself: “So from a short little Wyoming hick nobody he’d become a wiry bantam rooster of an expert moving low and fast.” But this specificity does not extend to the rest of his career. By the bottom of the page he has faded back into generality: “CEO. About as high as a guy could go…. Hired and fired, restructured whole divisions, traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.”

Compared with the virtuosic displays of corporate diction in Saunders’s other work—the crumpled emotional evasions of “The Moron Factory” (“Then assure self: yes, yes, of course, still fine, that ship sailed long ago, are at peace with, we two have great life full of laughs + tenderness”), the vicious neutrality of “93990” (“Animals 93001 and 93458 exhibited vomiting, anxiety, disorientation, and digging at their abdomens”), the chipper threats of “Exhortation” (“I’m saying let’s try not to dissect every single thing we do in terms of ultimate good/bad/indifferent in terms of morals”)—Boone’s bluster is surprisingly generic, almost perfunctory. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about it,” he shouts. He assembles the familiar rationalizations: “What had he ever ‘denied’? Nothing. He’d challenged, sure, he’d asked for a higher level of certainty, he’d pulled at loose threads in certain specious arguments.”

What Boone is justifying is as monstrous as anything in those stories, but this time it feels like Saunders is holding back. It’s not that the subject doesn’t lend itself to that kind of study in amoral justification—quite the contrary. Merchants of Doubt (2010), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s now classic study of industry efforts to distort public perceptions of the health risks of cigarettes and the effects of various forms of pollution, especially climate change, offers a dismaying portrait of the scientists involved. We are shown the origins of their arrogance, their feelings of resentment when the field rejects one or another of their claims or when their political goals are frustrated, and how those feelings harden over time into a mercenary antisociality; we are shown the mechanisms of their interference and obfuscation—committees derailed or manipulated, studies mischaracterized or ignored, scientific credentials and sweeping claims used to bamboozle mainstream journalists. Their mendacity is a process, a sustained descent into a very human evil. Nothing like that ever quite emerges in Boone’s bedroom.

Lincoln in the Bardo is one of the best novels ever written about grief: the grief of a father for a son, the grief of the dead for their own lost lives, the griefs piling up beyond counting in a country at war. Vigil inherits much of its idiosyncratic metaphysics, from the spirits shape-shifting to match their moods and thoughts (“One’s appearance might be distorted by detritus from one’s psyche,” as Jill puts it), to the way they tend to sink ever deeper into their own fixations the longer they stick around on Earth, to a teasing vagueness about where, exactly, the dead end up when they finally leave. The job of luring them to do so has become professionalized in the intervening decades, it seems—the sustained, personal “comfort” Jill offers, as a member of a global “guild of sorts,” is a far cry from the hectic, surrealistic “onslaught” of tempting visions to which the dead of Lincoln are periodically subjected. But the fundamental idea that the dead linger, to their detriment, if they refuse to accept their demise is the same in both.

Vigil is at once broader and narrower than its predecessor. It is about half as long, and much less varied. In place of Lincoln’s faux-historical collage of wildly disparate voices, we have the friendly narration of Jill throughout; instead of a full cemetery’s worth of unreconciled dead, chaotically jockeying with one another, we have just a handful of spirits, most with a direct relationship to Boone, and the action is largely confined to the room in which he is dying. At times a version of Lincoln’s grotesquerie pokes through: as a pair of corrupted pro-oil scientists address Boone, they start shitting out copies of themselves—or rather, “replicas began dropping from [their] rears”—“until the room was so packed…that several of the replicas were nudged out through the wall and, while still in the process of introducing themselves, tumbled down into the yard below.” Before they finally depart,

the replicas shrank down and each scurried back up into the respective rear of its original until only the two original[s]…remained, wincing somewhat at the discomfort associated with the ongoing, continual rear reentry of their miniature selves.

And yet the grief at the center of this book is immense, planet-size: “This lovely old place, ruined forever, maybe.” Lincoln hinges on the denial of one’s own personal dying, and the solution is acceptance—difficult, but definite. Vigil takes up the denial of the dying of the world itself, and the solution is—what? How can we find it, until the liars repent?

Just as the Frenchman struggles to come up with something that will convince Boone of his wrongdoing, the book struggles, perhaps inevitably, to communicate a loss of this size: the details are too familiar, the whole too horrible to take in. Boone is presented with a selection of birds threatened by global warming—“Lost forever. Think upon that dreadful phrase, monsieur!”; the memories of a schoolgirl, dismayed by the newly incomprehensible seasons—“For two solid days (in December!) August returned”; the testimony of an Indian man who died, along with his family, of heat and dehydration—“That is to say, I had to watch as they succumbed.” The dry understatement of that last attempt is moving (how could it not be?), but it may also be a little underwhelming to anyone who has read the opening section of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), which tells of a similar tragedy at a much greater scale and in appalling detail.

Throughout his career, Saunders has insisted that his writing is unplanned, driven by moment-to-moment intuition rather than ideas or political arguments. The apparent anticapitalist bent of his early stories, he said in 2001, was something that “honestly hadn’t occurred to me…. I think that if you set out to write a political story, then…your story will be confined by your ability to conceptualize it.” “I always say I try not to write with a definite intention,” he declared in 2016. “One of the reasons I’m so emphatic about that is to counterbalance my very natural tendency to write with a definite (dogmatic) intention,…to counteract what I know is a lazy or preachy tendency.” When asked recently how much of his stories he knows in advance, he answered, “Ideally, none.”

But climate change is a vast, systemic problem, and in writing Vigil he apparently abandoned some of that resistance to systematic writing. The book began with a distinct set of questions and ideas. During the deadly storms and flooding around the world in 2023, he has said, “I thought about the generation of climate-change deniers in the late ’90s and the early 2000s,” and he set out to imagine how one of them might react to these kinds of events: “What does that do to a person as they look back at their alleged accomplishments?… Does the reality break through?” And as he revised the novel, he wrote out a nine-page “meaning outline” to track the progress of these ideas, section by section—though he is “not a fan of outlines, generally.” (He included that outline, in its entirety, in a recent installment of Story Club: Saunders is surely the least reticent of this country’s great writers.)

Some of Vigil’s failures do seem the fruit of this sin: the familiar, pre-chewed quality of certain scenes and characters, the odd thinness of some of the language. Others, though, seem more the result of an unwillingness to quite commit to its own intentions. “The ethos” the book “seemed to want from me was one of understatement,” Saunders has said, “erring on the side of letting the reader come to her own conclusion about certain elements.” Vigil’s unexpectedly tame depictions of the horrors of climate change, and its odd inability to get past Boone’s brash surface and hardscrabble backstory to actually imagine his crimes, testify to the risks of understatement. The novel knows what it wants to say—its view of Boone’s actions and their consequences is unambiguous—it is just unwilling to say it at full volume. As I reread Vigil, I found myself thinking of other, angrier novels, books unafraid of their own simplicity: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, naturally, far less elegant than Vigil, and far more affecting, and even Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), whose deliriously vindictive portrayal of Richard Nixon and the trial of the Rosenbergs puts Vigil’s diffident didacticism to shame.

Now and then, as the book proceeds, its attention slides away from Boone. Jill leaves his side and finds memories of her own death returning: a grotesque murder, as it turns out, for which the killer was never punished. She periodically wanders next door to watch the wedding, which progresses throughout the novel alongside Boone’s decline. These are not really distractions, of course—the book is too tightly constructed for that. Jill’s superhuman empathy for her unrebuked murderer, her ability to share his emotions and thereby see him not as an evildoer but as “an inevitable occurrence,” offers us one way to understand Boone, though she herself struggles to maintain that attitude. And eventually Jill searches the minds of the wedding guests to see whether they, too, are aware of the climate collapse the spirits are haranguing Boone about. She sends her “alertness out in every direction” at the party and finds that “yes, they were. Many of them knew about it, believed in it. But were carrying on.”

These glimpses of the wedding are among the book’s liveliest moments—the bride and groom sneaking off to canoodle in the pantry, which “was, they felt, proof of the daring, special, epic love-bond between them”; a guest whose husband is unfaithful putting on a brave face for “Joyce Jackson, a bright-eyed TV interviewer in her mind,” as she sits alone watching him gaze at his mistress, also a guest at the wedding. The book snaps into focus when it ignores its own great subject in favor of the grubby resentments and delusions that have always powered Saunders’s work. It makes, that is, a strong case for carrying on.

Saunders leaves it to us to connect the guests’ unconcern to the propaganda Boone and his kind have spread for decades. Jill does her best to spare him any suffering, in the end, though the book condemns him instead to join the Frenchman in his endless quest to convince other climate sinners of their crimes—becoming a hopeless Jacob Marley, “a form of Hell,” as Saunders puts it in the outline.

Vigil, in effect, turns against its own conception: repentance comes too late to matter, to Boone or to anyone else. All it brings is torment to one man, “possibly forever.” Blame changes nothing, can change nothing, at this late date, but nothing is offered in its place. It is part of the book’s unsatisfying, unsettling effect that it goes to such lengths to stage these questions and then negates every answer it offers. Its rage and despair never quite win out over its genial humanity, and never quite lose. The most moving predicament it presents is not Jill’s or Boone’s but the author’s: a writer writing against his own nature, as hard as he can, in the face of the catastrophe.