Vigil by George Saunders
As our world grows ever more violently divided, it’s worth recalling that perhaps the best piece written on the U.S.-Mexico border came from the novelist George Saunders, in 2007. Driving up and down the contested area on assignment for GQ, talking to one soul after another, he couldn’t help warming to the reasonable and understanding Border Patrol officers trying to maintain some order. But his heart was also naturally with those struggling to cross the line to find a better, safer life. And he fell in with “likable,” “gentlemanly” Christians on the prosperous side of the divide who nonetheless confessed they were unsettled by the flood of newcomers. Here was a writer who, covering Trump rallies for The New Yorker in 2016, found many of the people with whom he vehemently disagreed “funny, generous with their time … generally, in favor of order.”
Saunders, in short, is in the business of blowing up simple binaries; having quietly maintained a Tibetan Buddhist practice for many years, he seems mostly committed to equal-opportunity empathy. In recent years, his books have evolved into unsparing—though compassionate—inquiries into reality, suffering, and death, made zesty by gangs of supernatural figures who sound like they’re yukking it up at the local bar. In his masterful first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, ghouls and spirits keep chattering away, as if at a corner barbershop, while Abraham Lincoln mourns his dead 11-year-old son, Willie. The result is a literary thangka,or Tibetan scroll, that takes in heaven, hell, and most of the places in between.
