Interview | Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders on his new novel, Vigil

Q: Would you say that K.J. Boone, the oil tycoon in Vigil, remains in denial because there’s shame attached to what he took pride in, so he feigns ignorance by telling himself stories to protect his self-image?

A: That’s right, but he’s a bit of an exaggerated case. Denial is always related to terror, fear. You live your life a certain way, and it’s all tamped down in a box. If you lift that lid even a little bit, you want to push it down because you can’t imagine doing that again

.There’s this Tolstoy story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The protagonist feels that he did things the way they should’ve been done. But towards the end, when he gets sick, he’s in a lot of physical and psychological pain because he can’t admit that he may have lived the wrong way. His transformation begins when he finally says to god, ‘okay, I accept maybe I didn’t live the right way’, and that’s when things start to change.

We poor humans have these little mechanical minds to make our way through this vast universe, so we’re always making stories and models that turn out to be inadequate to make sense of things. The way [Oliver] Cromwell says it, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

Q: In an interview, you quote Edward Ruscha: “Every artist wants to make a picture that will open the gates to heaven.” Why does this singular way of thinking about heaven — that it’s gatekept and has a definitive path towards it — continue to inspire purchase in storytelling?

A: Because it correlates with something that we know is true — that day-to-day life on Earth can be hell or a heaven.

As a Buddhist, I’d say that it depends so much on your mind. You know, if your mind is in a miserable, negative, self-loathing place, not only is your experience hellish, but you project hellishness out and people feel it. Whereas we’ve all had those beautiful days when we feel lovely and generous.

The reason we’ve made the pearly gates — and also the fire and brimstone — is because we have hints of that in every moment. Do we have hints that those things are real after death? I’ve no idea, but in life we have both — hell and heaven.

Q: Was leveraging Jill’s ghost as the narrator a way to render fluidity to navigate this space between surety, denial, and the ‘I don’t know’ aspect of dealing with one’s life?

It gave me more inquisitors from a wider range of experience, surely. It’s helpful to have a variety of viewpoints. Liberating, in fact. For example, if I had a man and a woman at the kitchen table, it’d be, ‘Okay’. But if I put in the man’s dead father, who’s a communist, suddenly we’ve got a little fun. I’m always trying for organised cacophony in my fiction. The more voices, the better.

When I’m starting, I’m not thinking of any of this. It’s always like I’m in a ship, trying to steer towards the choppiest water, the water with the most energy. How do I know where to go? It’s never by thinking about themes or anything, but by feeling, ‘Ok, I can do it’. So, I had a dead guy in bed, but do I want to just stay in his head the whole book? No. Then, what? I need a chorus. Who’s there? His wife? Okay, but not that exciting. She’s not going to be saying much. Now, when I start thinking about a working-class woman who died in 1976, I can see we’ll have fun.

I’m always emphasising to my students that as much as writing is an intellectual and analytical act, it’s as much to do with entertainment and instinct. I quote Flannery O’Connor often, “You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.”

Q: Making someone laugh is powerful, but it can only be achieved when there’s this equitable space, with the oppressor and the oppressed on the same footing. What are your thoughts?

A: I think what you just said is beautiful. That’s exactly right. And I couldn’t say it better. It’s funny that the way to get a laugh is somewhat intuitive. It’s a bit like being the class clown, knowing what to say, at precisely the right minute, and with the correct amount of spontaneity to get a laugh. If you hesitate even a second, the joke falls flat. But sometimes when you look at your text, you notice a denial or falseness in it, so just letting the text respond to its own falseness can be very funny.

Q: Reading your chiselled work reminds me of Paul Auster, who called pruning a text ‘raking’. In leaving bits out, you allow the readers to fill in the gaps. Are you conscious of this moment of co-creation while writing?

A: I think the operating assumption is that you, my reader, are a little smarter than I am. A little more worldly. A little more of everything. So, I’m trying to appeal to you to keep listening to me, by going ahead in the text and making sure that it’s worthy of you.

If you’re on a bus, and someone’s talking, being a little elliptical or quiet, you tend to lean in. I think that’s the game: the writer has to get the reader to lean in. And omission is a really good way to suggest that a reader’s intelligence is being respected, and I think she’d like it when she’s asked to supply something. 

That kind of an intimate back and forth, mechanically, for me, is a strange process to describe, but it can be simulated. The great article of faith I’ve been living by is that even the smallest adjustment feels like an increase in respect for the reader, so just take even that one extraneous word out. The effect becomes quite magical when you do this over and over and over again.

Q: You experienced an eye-opening moment seeing elderly women in Singapore while working in oilfields, realising that you’ve bought into a wrong story, that the Atlas Shrugged world was built on a human cost.

A: Yes, the workers were being hidden in the night presumably so that the next morning the site would be clean. But the thing that happened to me was that I did see the human cost, because it connected with my experience. My family in Texas was having financial trouble, and money issues create this stress. And seeing the women, I realised that I’m in allegiance with those women, although I was much more privileged than them. The rich basically use working-class people as tools, which, once unnecessary, could be discarded. So, from being an American oil guy, travelling in Asia, having exotic adventures, I went to the other side of the boundary in that moment.

Q: Could you tell us what the years of writing Vigil were like?

A: During those years, some members of my extended family were facing health issues. And then, there was the difficult political situation over here [in the U.S.], which I feel very personally. All this made the writing schedule difficult. 

I’m usually pretty buoyant and optimistic. But writing Vigil was, perhaps, less straightforwardly enjoyable because of everything going on, but, strangely, it might have been helpful for the book. Illness and fear of illness in my life added a bit of sobriety to the book because the events in the book felt more real to me. 

The book froze in a place for a long time, but I think subconsciously I was doing a lot of fast dancing while it stayed there, so the result was, I think, a bit deeper. Vigil is a more complex book than I imagined it’d be at the outset.