Blog about George Saunders’ novel Vigil, a novel I have not yet read (Book acquired 11 Feb. 2026)

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I’ve been reading a lot of David Ohle lately — the Moldenke cycle, specifically. I read The Pisstown Chaos (2008) late last year, then kept going with The Old Reactor (2013), and then reread The Age of Sinatra (2004). I’m near the end of a  reread of Ohle’s seminal weirdo novel Motorman (1972) right now, and I’ve got The Blast (2014) and The Death of a Character (2021) on the way.

The Moldenke books take place in an abject, stinky, ruinous post-apocalyptic landscape populated with jellyheads, neutrodynes, imps, Stinkers, and Americans. The world runs on broken logic and bureaucratic absurdity. Order is repeatedly disrupted by Chaoses and Forgettings. Bodies fail; technology fails. Ohle relates these stories in a genteel, dry tone (especially in the later books) that mocks any hint of a Hero Saving the Day. His novels, especially those published during US America’s foolish GWOT misadventures, capture the spirit of my country’s farcical post-twentieth-century trajectory.

But this blog post is ostensibly about George Saunders, or rather George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I have not yet read, having only just today received a review copy in the mail.

I do not think that a writer has a cultural duty to respond to now, or Now, or even “Now!” if you like–but I do think that Saunders has always aimed to respond to the US American zeitgeist in his fictions. And in the best of his fictions — including the stories “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — Saunders skewered US American absurdity with a tender pathos that balanced his dark humor without overpowering its core anger. But Saunders’ later fiction is perhaps over-seasoned with love, empathy, all that hippy-dippy shit. It’s not necessary to look through everyone’s eyes. Empathy has its limits. Latter-day Saunders often read to me as, in its worst moments, sanctimonious.

NYT critic Dwight Garner didn’t use the word “sanctimonious” to describe Saunders in his negative review of  Vigil, but his lede comes close:

“Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. It was once difficult to imagine this dictum might apply to George Saunders.

From the start, in the mid-1990s, he’s been an American original, a briskly whiskered national asset. He’s an ineluctably strange, dark and funny writer whose work has some of Mark Twain’s subversive wit, Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic playfulness and Donald Barthelme’s laboratory blitzing of high and low culture.

It was my colleague who alerted me to this review, which I skimmed, noting the phrase “Downhill Alert!”, before dispensing with it. (My colleague wants me to read the book in some kind of, uh, I don’t know, tandem?, with him.)

This colleague loved Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not love Lincoln in the Bardo. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it maudlin, trite. It was like watching your dad try and impress your boss (I don’t know what that means). I wrote that year, 2017, that—

Lincoln in the Bardo might be a really good novel and I just can’t see it or hear it or feel it. I see postmodernism-as-genre, as form; I read bloodless overcooked posturing; I feel schmaltz. I failed the novel, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure it’s good, right? The problem is me, as usual.

By 2018 I had changed my mind on that last sentence. I read Saunders’ New Yorker published short story “Little St. Don” and thought it was a massive, massive failure to respond to the incipient fascist encroachment of the first Trump administration. I concluded that,

Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.

I thought Saunders’ next two New Yorker stories were a smidge stronger, calling “Elliott Spencer,” “a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters.” Of “Love Letter,” I suggested that the exercise “reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. But is that enough?”

Vigil is about a dying oil tycoon visited by a comforting angel, or series of angels, or something like that. It is, if I understand correctly, Saunders’ take on “climate fiction,” which I imagine will not really dwell in the nasty gross irreal reality of the fall we are falling into right now. But I could be wrong. I can’t help but notice that Vigil seems to be organized, like Lincoln in the Bardo, around a “Great Man” in USAian history — a mover and shaker, a powerbroker, a markmaker, etc. I’ll try to read it with an open mind, but I have to admit that even the prospect pales against my recent dip into Ohle’s sour, funky flavors. But we shall see.

 

“Blake Oblique” — David Ohle

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“Blake Oblique”

by

David Ohle

(from Io #29, 1982)

When Blake was eighteen, he was sent to the United States where he attended Oral Roberts University. He solved the problem of school expenses by constructing his own portable home at the edge of campus. It consisted of a covered wagon built on an old auto chassis, the wooden sides being covered with a canvas roof. Inside, there was a bunk, a stove, table, chair and a rack for books. He managed to live on about $5 a month by doing his own housekeeping and eating vegetables and fruits sent to him by his wife, Catherine, all the way from 3 Fountain Court, Blake’s London home.

If one visits the Historical Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, even today, one can see Blake’s cozy wagon, reconstructed in painstaking detail, down to the chamber pot and its darkly waxen contents.

There was a time, after his trial for sedition, when Blake learned to be idle. He wandered about from house to house, asking for crusts at back windows. He tattled and became a busybody, speaking things he oughtn’t. Arrested, he was publicly spanked, to no avail. In short order, he was haunting the alleyways, selling tobacco to innocent children, spreading gossip like butter. Again arrested, his poor feet were clubbed senseless with billy bats. He was then set loose in the icy streets. He fell asleep sitting on a gutter’s edge. By morning his feet were frozen, a sickening blue. He made his way to the Strand and begged a surgeon to take them off by any means at hand. The surgeon obliged, blowing an analgesic powder into Blake’s face before going to work with a bonesaw and a chisel. When the feet were freed of their stumps, the surgeon, one Joan Anglicus, head them into a nail keg and, for the moment, that was that. Exhausted, she lay in her bed to nap, where she dreamt of a Dutchman in wooden shoes. Waking, she went to a closet, selecting a pair of stout, birch shoetrees. Using metal clamps, carriage bolts, an auger, and tap-screws, she affixed them to Blake’s protruding ankle bone. Continue reading ““Blake Oblique” — David Ohle” →

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion

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The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick, 1981. Timescape Books (July 1982). Cover by Rowena Morrill. 223 pages.

I love Rowena’s cover for PKD’s second entry in the VALIS trilogy. (Saddam Hussein was a fan of her art too, btw.)

The James Joyce riff from early in The Divine Invasion—

Into the stereo microphones Asher said distinctly, ” ‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don’t butt me- hike !-when you bend. Or whatever-‘”

“What is this?” the autochthon said, listening to the translation into his own tongue. Grinning, Herb Asher said, “A famous Terran book. ‘Look, look, the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ‘Tis endless now senne- “The man is mad,” the autochthon said, and turned toward the hatch, to leave.

“It’s Finnegans Wake,” Herb Asher said. “I hope the translating computer got it for you. ‘Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear-‘

The autochthon had left, convinced of Herb Asher’s insanity. Asher watched him through the port; the autochthon strode away from the dome in indignation. Again pressing the switch of the external bullhorn, Herb Asher yelled after the retreating figure, “You think James Joyce was crazy, is that what you think? Okay; then explain to me how come he mentions ‘talktapes’ which means audio tapes in a book he wrote starting in 1922 and which he completed in 1939. Before there were tape recorders! You call that crazy? He also has them sitting around a TV set — in a book started four years after World War I. I think Joyce was a– The autochthon had disappeared over a ridge. Asher released the switch on the external bullhorn.

It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned ‘talk- tapes” in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.

The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print | Don DeLillo

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(The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print — the author’s way of adding his own neat quarter-notch to the scarred bluesteel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif, and numerous commentators have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war. But this sort of thing is of little interest to the exemplary spectator. As Alan Zapalac says later on: “I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing.” The exemplary spectator is the person who understands that sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible. It’s a form of society that is rat free and without harm to the unborn; that is organized so that everyone follows precisely the same rules; that is electronically controlled, thus reducing human error and benefiting industry; that roots out the inefficient and penalizes the guilty; that tends always to move toward perfection. The exemplary spectator has his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it’s details he needs — impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name. The spectator’s pleasure, when not derived from the action itself, evolves from a notion of the game’s unique organic nature. Here is not just order but civilization. And part of the spectator’s need is to sort the many levels of material: to allot, to compress, to catalogue. This need leaps from season to season, devouring much of what is passionate and serene in the spectator. He tries not to panic at the final game’s final gun. He knows he must retain something, squirrel some food for summer’s winter. He feels the tender need to survive the termination of the replay. So maybe what follows is a form of sustenance, a game on paper to be scanned when there are stale days between events; to be propped up and looked at — the book as television set — for whatever is in here of terminology, pattern, numbering. But maybe not. It’s possible there are deeper reasons to attempt a play-by-play. The best course is for the spectator to continue forward, reading himself into the very middle of that benign illusion. The author, always somewhat corrupt in his inventions and vanities, has tried to reduce the contest to basic units of language and action. Every beginning, it is assumed, must have a neon twinkle of danger about it, and so grandmothers, sissies, lepidopterists and others are warned that the nomenclature that follows is often indecipherable. This is not the pity it may seem. Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see — a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.)

From Don DeLillo’s 1972 novel End Zone.

Sunday Comix

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B. Kliban’s back cover for Arcade #7, Fall 1976, The Print Mint.

Hat Questionnaire — Claes Oldenburg

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Claes Oldenburg’s response to the hat questionnaire. From, “The Hat Issue,” Milk Quarterly #11 & 12, 1978.

“Don’t Forget Anger” — Ted Berrigan

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“Don’t Forget Anger” by Ted Berrigan. From Mother #5, Summer 1965.

John A. Williams’ !Click Song (Book acquired 28 Jan. 2026)

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I picked up a copy of John A. Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song after reading Ishmael Reed’s write up of it from Rediscoveries II. From Reed’s essay–

The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.

Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said, “the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams.

Amulet — Jordan Sullivan

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Amulet, 2025 by Jordan Sullivan (b. 1983)

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From “Modern America” by Robert Crumb. Published in Arcade #2, Summer 1975, The Print Mint.

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of (or excess of) guides and commentaries on the novel can perhaps have the adverse and unintentional consequence of making readers new to Infinite Jest believe that they can’t “get it” without help.  Many of the online analyses and resources for Infinite Jest are created by and targeted to readers who have finished the novel or are rereading the novel. While I’ve read many insightful and enlightening commentaries on the novel over the years, my intuition remains that the superabundance of analysis may have the paradoxical effect of actually impeding readers new to the text. With this in mind, I’d suggest that first-time readers need only a dictionary and some patience.

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (sociocultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made for the reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. Getting to this scene is perhaps a demand on the patience of many readers. And, while the scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until, like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

Where is a fair place to abandon Infinite Jest? 

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes. They are essential). Incandenza’s filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

What about a guide?

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere, as I noted above. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

Still: Two online resources that might be useful are “Several More and Less Helpful Things for the Person Reading Infinite Jest,” which offers a glossary and a few other unobtrusive documents, and “Infinite Jest: A Scene-By-Scene Guide” which is not a guide at all, but rather a brief series of synopses of each scene in the novel, organized by page number and year; my sense is that this guide would be helpful to readers attempting to delineate the novel’s nonlinear chronology—however, I’d advise against peeking ahead. After you read you may wish to search for a plot diagram of the novel, of which there are several. But I’d wait until after.

An incomplete list of motifs readers new to Infinite Jest may wish to attend to

The big advantage (and pleasure) of rereading Infinite Jest is that the rereader may come to understand the plot anew; IJ is richer and denser the second go around, its themes showing brighter as its formal construction clarifies. The rereader is free to attend to the imagery and motifs of the novel more intensely than a first-time reader, who must suss out a byzantine plot propelled by a plethora of characters.

Therefore, readers new to IJ may find it helpful to attend from the outset to some of the novel’s repeated images, words, and phrases. Tracking motifs will help to clarify not only the novel’s themes and “messages,” but also its plot. I’ve listed just a few of these motifs below, leaving out the obvious ones like entertainment, drugs, tennis (and, more generally, sports and games), and death. The list is in no way definitive or analytic, nor do I present it as an expert; rather, it’s my hope that this short list might help a reader or two get more out of a first reading.

Heads

Cages

Faces

Masks

Teeth

Cycles

Maps

Waste

Infants

Pain

Deformities

Subjects

Objects

One final note

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept first posted a version of this note in the summer of 2015. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Infinite Jest’s publication. Wallace’s novel remains underread by overtalkers].

“Barricades of Welcome” — Pete Winslow

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“Barricades of Welcome”

by

Pete Winslow

Welcome from the Kiwanis and Rotary
Said the sign by the road block
Welcome said the mayor
Locking all doors with the key to the city
Each motel had a sign that said welcome
But the wind whistled through the rooms
And there was no furniture
The Chamber of Commerce gave you a map
Showing the way out of town
An angry mob carrying welcome signs
Chased you across the city limits
You could hear it for miles as you ran down the highway
An insane cry of welcome welcome welcome
You were well on your way to learning the language of
the place.

The Passage — Shyama Golden

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The Passage, 2022 by Shyama Golden (b. 1983)

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People,” a poem by David Berman

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“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People”

by

David Berman

Insects are a manifestation of negative will.
—Anon.

I thought I saw an angel below the engine
but it was just vibrating air.

People used to see things
in the woods and the air and the closet:
spirits, dragons, and headless things,
lost and angry floats
conspiring to make every stomach pulse
like an almost accident
and every body’s head come unwound.

Our vision is not so fuzzy now.
We stare into eyes and see their parts,
have cameras, sidewalks, pills,
and other futuristic devices.
Some of our race have counted up into the highest numbers,
the high clear numbers.

Now we know the speed of light,
and that we never see anything just when it happens,
but a part of a second afterwards.
People are getting lost in their own houses,
wandering down hallways and through rooms for years.
We stumble downstairs full of water,
and when I wake up it all pours out of me.

From Caliban #8, 1990.

The issue also contains a few illustrations by Berman, including this one:

Mass-market Monday | Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died

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And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ, 1970. Ace Books (n.d., c. 1978). No cover artist or designer credited. 189 pages.

From Samuel R. Delany’s review of And Chaos Died:

The first two pages of this hardcover reprint of And Chaos Died present the protagonist, Jai Vedh, as a quietly despairing modern man with a nearly psychotic desire to merge with the universe. Moreover, it is suggested that this essentially religious desire is a response to the meaninglessness and homogeneity of every day life. There is a vacuum inside him; and when, on a business trip in a spaceship that has taken him off the surface of Old Earth (“on which every place was like every other place, ” p. 9), he senses the great vacuum of space itself about the ship, the real vacuum and the psychological vacuum become confused. Propelled by his desire for mergence,

on the nineteenth day he threw himself against one of the portals, flattening himself as if in immediate collapse, the little cousin he had lived with all his life become so powerful in the vicinity of its big relative that he could not bear it. Everything was in imminent collapse. He was found, taken to sick bay, and shot full of sedatives. They told him, as he went under, that the space between the stars was full of light, full of matter — what was it someone had said, an atom in a cubic yard? — and so not such a bad place after all. He was filled with peace, stuffed with it, replete; the big cousin was trustworthy.

Then the ship exploded. (p. 10)

The place Jai Vedh comes to, along with the philistine captain of the exploded spaceship, is the first of Russ’s SF utopias. Noting the January 1970 publishing date on the original edition, and thus inferring 1968/1969 as the most probable time of composition, we may be tempted to read this particular utopia as a kind of arcadian fall-out of that decade’s ecological crusade. A more sensitive reader of SF will, however, notice its sources in SF works that substantially predate that crusade: the nameless planet of telepaths takes its form from Clarke’s Lys (the more ruralized companion city to mechanical Diaspar in The City and the Stars, 1953) and from the world in Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Touch of Your Hand” ( 1953). What characterizes this particular SF image is not rural technology, but advanced technology hidden behind a rural facade; not human communication in good faith, but ordinarily invisible communicational pathways (some form of ESP); and it is always left and then returned to.

Sunday Comix

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From “What Is Government?” by Clifford Peter Harper, a visual adaptation of text by Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Published in Anarchy Comics #3, July 1981, Last Gasp Comics.