Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel from Booker Prize winning author George Saunders is about a man who has spent his life doing very bad things. The central question isn't how can you live with yourself? It's how can you die with yourself? You see, that's because oil tycoon K.J. Boone is on his deathbed. Throughout his life, he has dedicated himself to lying to the public about the dangers of climate change.

Now dying of cancer, Boone is stuck in the space between life and death, and spirits have gathered at his bedside to demand that he repent, all except one, the ghost of a woman named Jill "Doll" Blaine. Jill's job is to come down from the beyond to help comfort the dying as they pass on. At first she thinks this job will be like any other, but soon she learns that K.J. Boone has a lot to reckon with in his final hours.

The novel is titled Vigil. It's the first novel from George Saunders since his acclaimed book, Lincoln in the Bardo. It was published yesterday. Kirkus Review says Saunders has crafted a novel that feels deeply resonant, especially in these fractious times. I'm joined in studio now by George Saunders. It is nice to speak with you in person.

George Saunders: It's so nice to speak with you in person, too.

Alison Stewart: You told the New York Times that when you were writing a book, this wasn't what was supposed to happen. [laughs]

George Saunders: Correct.

Alison Stewart: The book that you wrote, what was your original plan?

George Saunders: The original plan was, I knew it was basically a stinker dies. That was the idea. I thought that this woman would be really good at her job and she would be comforting him in some way and he'd either take the bait or he wouldn't. Then once I got into it, she turned out to be so complicated. I think of her as someone who has the right idea but isn't that good at executing it. Then suddenly the book started being about this whole question of if you were going to comfort somebody who was pretty bad, how would you go about it? That's something I don't really know the answer to. That makes for a fun writing session.

Alison Stewart: As a writer, do your characters come first or does the story come first, or does it just all happen at the same time?

George Saunders: It's mostly, like in this case, just this really bare outline. Stinker dies.

Alison Stewart: Stinker dies.

George Saunders: Stinker dies.

Alison Stewart: That's what it says on the post. [laughs]

George Saunders: That could be the title. Then for me it's about language. In this case I knew I was going to have to do the voice of the oil guy and the voice of the woman. If that doesn't happen, nothing happens. Even all the ideas that I might have about the story get put on hold until they start talking to me. I grew up in Chicago, and we did voices all the time to amuse ourselves. That's the first order of business, is find a voice that's full of fun and then just start doing that and then the story comes out of that, basically.

Alison Stewart: Jill "Doll" Blaine, her voice comes from where?

George Saunders: Originally, she was two different characters in an early draft. There was two ghosts, and one was this haughty 19th century high diction guy like in Lincoln in the Bardo, and the other I imagined her as a woman from my neighborhood in Chicago in 1976. Just a plain-speaking sweetheart, really. Those two ghosts were in the book for a while and it just didn't seem like they were both needed. It seemed a little slow, so I just melded them together.

Her voice is a two parter. One is she's very articulate and high minded, and then every so often she slips down into this more raucous person. Then, in a certain way I had that voice like, "Why is she talking in two different modes?" That becomes the story of the book. Why is this one person presenting in those two different ways?

Alison Stewart: How did you cope with the name K.J. Boone?

George Saunders: I don't know. Maybe partly Boone Pickens. I knew a lot of oil guys and they were never like Tom Smith. They always had these dramatic, weird names, though.

Alison Stewart: In your last novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, it also dealt with spirits, this in between life and death. What attracts you about that space?

George Saunders: I think I'm always looking for something to liven things up a little bit. I'm a not great guitar player, but I notice that when I play in D, things happen that are fun. In B flat, I can't do it. With a dead person in a book or a ghost, I think that the temporal aspect gets interesting because suddenly you could have two young hipsters and somebody from 1460 shows up, or also spatially you could have somebody from another continent come in.

I think it just broadens the rhetoric in a way that does-- for me, the most important thing is it leads me to a zone where I'm not quite sure what I'm doing. It takes it from being a smarty pants who knows what he wants to say to truly doing improv. That improv is the place where I get the most energy going.

Alison Stewart: I love that idea of people coming from different areas of different times and having to communicate with one another.

George Saunders: I think it allows you to cut into the real deep question of the book. You might not know what it is, but they do, which is the strange thing.

Alison Stewart: In the book, did you make rules or guides for yourself about how these people of our ilk, [chuckles] how they would behave as ghosts, as spirits?

George Saunders: No, I try to not do any of that in advance because the theory is that this improv will tell me. Sometimes that's nice because you might have a moment where this rule of the world is working against this other one, and then your job is to go, "Oh, okay. It's a different world than I thought. It's more complicated." This afterlife compared to the one in Lincoln in the Bardo is, to me, a little scarier. Maybe like the real world, a little less rules based than it used to be. I picked up an element of chaos, the kind of chaos that one might feel after leaving this body.

In the Buddhist traditions, they say that when you die, your mind has been like a horse on a tether. It's wild, but it's contained. Some of these Buddhist texts say that when you die, that tether gets cut, so your mind is supersized and very powerful, but that means that your projections and your fears are also supersized. I felt that in this world.

Alison Stewart: There is one detail I did notice is that you took care to describe what each ghost was wearing.

George Saunders: I didn't notice that myself. You can look at me. You can see that I'm a fashion plate.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I thought it was interesting because it gave me a sense of who they were, but it was ghosts wearing clothes. I don't know.

George Saunders: That also raised the question because in some ghostly worlds, you would be dressed the way you were dressed when you died. I think in this one, now that you mention it, thank you, they're dressed in the way that's most emblematic of who they were maybe in their prime or something, or in their essence, something like that. Thank you for that. That's interesting.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Booker Prize winning author George Saunders. We're discussing his new novel, Vigil, which tells the story of an oil company man, a CEO. He's on his deathbed and a ghost who comes to comfort and challenge him in. It is out now. Jill is our spirit, our guide, our ghost. She's sent down to comfort the dying. Why does Jill do this and is she particularly good at this job?

George Saunders: She's not good at it, we find out. I think she does it because her life ended young, traumatically. For some reason in that moment, her instinct was to go directly towards the person responsible for her death. She inhabits him, which means she becomes one with him. She can read his mind, she can partake in his qualia. That has a profound effect on her, as I think it would on anybody. If you could occupy someone else's mind even for a split second, it would have the effect of going, "Oh, I have a mind. My mind is a bit of a trap." For her, this has the effect of rendering her extremely maybe too merciful.

Alison Stewart: Too merciful.

George Saunders: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Alison Stewart: She has the feeling that having been inside that person, how could they have been anything else? In the womb, they didn't choose to be the person. I can believe that maybe not as much as she does. Her method of comfort then is to just come down and try to convey this complicated philosophical idea to the person who's dying, which in this case doesn't really work so well.

Alison Stewart: Yes, because K.J. boone, he's near death and he's still a jerk. [laughs]

George Saunders: Yes. For me, that was the other question. There's this long tradition of deathbeds like the Scrooge and some Tolstoy. The idea that someone could be transformed at the end is very nice and very comforting. I had to think, as stubborn as people can be and as, really, obnoxious in real life, is it possible that somebody could get to the end and simply not repent? I'm sure that's true. I went into most of the book open to either one, and just looking at him to say, "Are you going to repent or not?"

Alison Stewart: In a way, sometimes I think, "Does he think he can escape this a little bit?"

George Saunders: He's pretty arrogant. He's never had much problem in his life. He's been so powerful.

Alison Stewart: Can you escape death, dude? Do you really think that? [laughs]

George Saunders: He thinks he can maybe call somebody.

Alison Stewart: Call somebody.

George Saunders: He knows a guy. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: We learn, though, that K.J. comes from an impoverished background and his career in oil was his way achieving the American dream. When you think about it, what power does the American dream and the pursuit of it, what power does it have on people?

George Saunders: Oh, that's an amazing question. [coughs] Sorry. I think for him and also, honestly, for many of us, I think, you're in a culture that's intensely capitalistic and it puts a pressure on us. I think, speaking for myself, I've always felt that if you drop below a certain line, it's going to really be costly and there might not be anybody coming for you.

I've known a lot of people in my life who, under that pressure, have just said, "It's never happening to me. I don't care what happens." I think he's one of those. He got a little stung by some embarrassment when he was young at being not wealthy, stung by some parental harshness. His resolve was not, "I'll find a community," or, "I'll work against poverty, but "I'm going to ironclad myself." I think that's a familiar American error.

We're seeing it now in so many ways. "If I just have power, enough power, then I don't have to engage with the realities of life. I can float above it," which is the greatest falsehood in the world, which we know because Jesus was crucified. There's no power that can get out of this life unscathed except the power of depending on other people and submitting yourself or admitting your own weakness, then there might be a way out of it. He doesn't have that power.

Alison Stewart: You're going to read a little bit from the book. Set this up for us.

George Saunders: This is Jill transitioning between voices. Usually, she's very philosophical and articulate, but there's a wedding next door, and she's weirdly attracted to it. In this case, she goes over there and she starts to regress, I guess, into her human self. She goes to the wedding and says, "I found myself getting teary like I used to at weddings. It was also dear. New dresses, suits, shoes, shiny ties in the torchlight, a man's large hand resting proudly upon the slender back of his date, mingled smells of perfume and cologne.

Memories arising of other weddings one had attended, of one's own wedding, of weddings one had seen in movie films. The clacking of plates set down upon tables recently unfolded. A feast spread out on a red cloth table. The beef, the ham, the turkey, Cornish game hens bundled browned, sauced, steaming heaps of fried calamari, a color rich cluster of vegetable dishes, a heap of sliced bread, massive white, brown, yellow dollops of custard beckoning from a second yellow cloth dessert table.

Soon the dancing would begin. The dancers, at first reluctant, made gradually bold by drinks and the sideways smiles of their fellow dancers. This collective feeling arising among them. Well, here we are, folks, together under the moon, still alive. Though, true enough, we're ruining our new clothes with spilled drinks and sweat. What the hey? Use it or lose it, right, kids? 'Goodness,' I thought. I was more Jill "Doll" Blaine than I had been in quite some time. On the other hand, how fun."

Alison Stewart: That was George Saunders reading from his new book, Vigil. What did you want to contrast between the deathbed and this wedding that Jill keeps wandering towards?

George Saunders: Partly, I was, "Dear reader, please sit by a deathbed for 100 pages." You're like, "Eh." Years ago, my wife and I went to Mantua in Italy, and we were taken on a tour of this, I think it's called the Poli palace or something. It's this incredibly weird pleasure palace that this guy designed so he could slip away with his mistress. There are all these really strange attempts at holography with these wall murals. You could just see that being drunk in there would be amazing. That day was really rich.

I thought of how one thing I hadn't done in my writing much was the fullness of life, the sensual pleasures and food and drink. I just had almost a little box in my head, like, "Try to get something like that." I thought, "Oh, a wedding." I just loved the discovered thing. She's a little bit like somebody who's sober who then walks through a bar. It's a real strong pull for her and she tries to resist and yet can't.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting in reading about K.J. Boone because he doesn't seem to care too much about the environment. He's an oil tycoon, and he goes off. First of all, when did you first start paying attention to the climate crisis, and when did you know you wanted to include it in this book?

George Saunders: I was in the oil business as a young person. I went to a place called the Colorado School of Mines and studied geophysics. I was sent to Asia and we were doing real hands-on-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

George Saunders: -oil exploration in the jungle. For a young idiot, it was very glamorous. It was like being Indiana Jones but getting paid for it. I thought that was a good entry place. At that time, it was in the '80s, so I never heard about climate change. Honestly, you, as a writer, are like, "I am not writing a climate change novel because that's heavy." I don't want to read that. As I'm getting older, that's like catnip. If part of my mind says, "You cannot write that," I'm like, "Ah, a challenge." Like with Lincoln. Who wants to write about Lincoln? That's too hard. As you get later on in your career, you think, "Oh, that might be--"

It reminds me of that joke, the guy goes to the doctor and says, "It hurts when I do this," and the doctor says, "Don't do that." It gives you something to work with. Climate change could be dull. I wrote it back when Biden was president and when I thought he would be president again. That seemed like the biggest thing we had to worry about.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about denialism? He gives a good old speech in there about denialism.

George Saunders: There's a wonderful book called the Merchants of Doubt. That book shows us that this denial movement that was so active with oil started with tobacco. It's the same moves. That was interesting to study that. Then, of course, if you want to know where denial is, you look at yourself and I can think, "Oh, yes, the things that I don't want to admit about myself or whatever--" There is a pattern you go through.

It was fun to write those sections and try to think, "If this was you, if I had been better at the oil business and actually become an executive, how is it that a somewhat reasonable person, he's not a demon, how can a somewhat reasonable person do a big, very heavy lie that has a lot of consequences, internalize it, live with it, and live with it for many, many years? How does that actually work mechanically?" It's not just him. We all do it to some extent. That was interesting.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Booker Prize winning author George Saunders. We're discussing his new novel, Vigil, which tells the story of an oil company CEO on his deathbed and the ghost who comes to comfort and challenge him. It's out now. Throughout the novel, no matter what we learn about Boone, Jill is kind, and she remains dedicated to comforting him. Why was it important to have her kindness remain even when it's challenged?

George Saunders: I came to see that that's part of her problem. In Buddhism, they have this idea called idiot compassion where you think kindness just means being nice and never getting angry or pushing back. I think that's part of her deal. She had such a powerful experience of empathy and universal love when she died that she's a bit addicted to it. There's another character in the book who's saying, "Look, if you really want to comfort somebody, sometimes you have to break them down. You have to have some tough love." For her, it doesn't resonate with her. She keeps trying to comfort this guy who it's very easy for him to shrug that off and dismiss it.

In the end, the book surprised me by being a bit tragic because I see her somebody who has a very powerful experience and makes a worldview and goes on autopilot sweetly. I love her. Then she keeps repeating, repeating, repeating. This is a time when she should really realize that she's on autopilot. Not to spoil it, but I'm not sure that she does.

Alison Stewart: Our last moment, there's an operatic adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo. What can you tell us?

George Saunders: Oh, it's amazing. It's composed by Missy Mazzoli, and the librettist is Royce Vavrek. It's going to debut at the Met in October. I believe it's the first premiere ever written by a woman at the Met. I've heard two early versions of it, and it's just mind blowingly good.

Alison Stewart: What are you excited to see on stage?

George Saunders: Oh, so excited. I've heard it with the piano, I've heard it with orchestra, but I've never seen it fully staged, so it's going to be wonderful.

Alison Stewart: The new book is called Vigil, it's by George Saunders, and it is out now. Thank you for coming to the studio. We appreciate it.

George Saunders: I love it. Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: It's the 250th anniversary of the American independence. Coming up, we'll learn about the family that helped make this country headed by a father who taught his daughters to read and write and think for themselves. Amanda Vaill, the author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, she joins us for this month's full bio conversation. That's next.