Book reviews: ‘Vigil: A Novel’ and ‘Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage’

‘Vigil: A Novel’ by George Saunders

George Saunders’ slim new novel is “a strikingly weird work of modern
fiction,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Like Lincoln in the Bardo, the author’s 2017 Booker Prize winner, Vigil concerns the liminal space between life and death, yet this story “seems to have risen up from the loamy soil of medieval allegory.” As K.J. Boone, former CEO of the world’s largest oil company, lies on his deathbed, he’s visited by various ghosts, including two who initiate a debate about whether to comfort Boone as his end nears or confront him with the enormous damage he’s done. Though Saunders’ language here is “rarely specifically Christian,” the story is “explicitly moral.” And because it’s a George Saunders book, Vigil is “full of philosophical musings, corny antics, and plaintive yearnings set down in lines as surprising and agile as deer.”

Given that Boone is depicted as indisputably guilty of and unrepentant about a world-wrecking career, “there is little moral work to do here,” said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. Fortunately, the story’s narrator, a ghost whose name in life was Jill “Doll” Blaine, is a “far more interesting creature.” Since her death in early adulthood in the 1960s, she has felt obliged to ease other souls from life into death. As she wrestles with whether Boone merits her usual kindnesses, Jill also suffers reminders of her previous life as a mortal, and it’s as unfinished souls that she and Saunders’ other ghosts are most compelling. Still, Saunders, a short-story master, has now written two consecutive novels about final reckonings watched over by comically argumentative spirits. “What once felt anarchic has hardened into habit, a repertoire of tricks and tics.” A self-help book disguised as literature, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times, “it’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.”

Vigil, because it wrestles with today’s world in a way Lincoln in the Bardo did not, proves the “more morally gripping” novel, said Gary Sernovitz in Bloomberg. The 87-year-old Boone is clearly modeled on former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, who during his 1993–2005 reign aggressively championed fossil fuel production and fought the findings of climate change science. Saunders, “just by being a master of American fiction,” makes us see such corporate leaders in a different light. “Which of us, Saunders might be asking, will not have regrets on our deathbed, and which of us will not wish to keep them at bay?” said Pico Iyer in Air Mail. Yes, he is less storyteller here than moral instructor, but he has cooked up “a jaunty, irreverent, and constantly surprising sermon on forgiveness.” With the possible exception of Bardo, “I’ve
never read anything like this before,” and “if I’m lucky, I’ll never forget it.”

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‘Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage’ by Heather Ann Thompson

“For a time, everyone knew Bernie Goetz’s name and face,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. In late 1984, the 37-year-old Manhattan resident shot four Black teenagers on a subway train after one had asked him for $5, and instead of being treated as a murderous racist, Goetz was hailed by the tabloid press as a vigilante hero. Surveys indicated that more than half of all New Yorkers supported him, including 45% of the city’s Black residents. Heather Ann Thompson, who won a Pulitzer for her 2016 book on the 1971 Attica prison uprising, has now delivered a similarly detailed reconstruction of the Goetz shooting and ensuing trials, and while she’s “doggedly fair-minded” in her presentation of the facts, “she treats the Goetz episode as the first whitecap on the surge of racial rage that rose with the Reagan era and has carried into our own.”

“Importantly, Thompson rejects stereotyping the teens as thuggish stickup kids,” said Walton Muyumba in The Boston Globe. “Instead, she crafts social, personal, and familial narratives to humanize them,” and she reminds readers that Goetz admitted that the teenagers didn’t threaten him and that he had boarded the train ready to kill anyone who approached him. It was his defense team that persuaded jurors to view Goetz as feeling threatened. Disorder was rampant in the city at the time, and Thompson provides a “sharply accurate” explanation of why that was so. Still, her argument that white rage was a response called forth by Reagan-era politics “seems slightly askew,” because white rage is, in fact, “older than the nation itself.”

Still, Thompson’s “powerful and moving” narrative runs a course similar to outrages we witness today, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. While one of his victims, 19-year-old Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed and suffered permanent brain damage in the shooting, he and the other victims were villainized, even receiving piles of hate mail. Thompson doesn’t end by dwelling on such hate. Instead, she turns our attention to the care Cabey received from his mother, and “it’s an affecting reminder of the love that, amid all the forces of ‘fear and fury,’ we cannot allow ourselves to forget.”