I feel like I’m the only reader who didn’t quite connect with George Saunders’s Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and even before that was published I had been mourning the fact that I didn’t love Saunders’s work as much as I once did. Still, I get excited when he publishes something new. He is undeniably distinctive, and I admire his fundamentally humane vision of the world. I bought his newest, Vigil, on publication day and dove in, but throughout I once again found myself frustrated.

In Vigil, Saunders returns to the afterlife and the lingering preoccupations of the ghosts who remain somehow tethered to our material world. Our narrator is one such ghost. Jill “Doll” Blaine died at twenty-two in a car bombing meant for her police-officer husband. For roughly half a century she has served as a kind of spiritual hospice worker, “comforting” the dying from the other side of death. Her newest charge is an octogenarian oil magnate who knowingly manipulated climate science and spread misinformation, becoming complicit in unleashing the ecological devastation plaguing a world saturated with “swollen ugliness.” This man remains belligerent and unrepentant, proud of the course he took in life.

The question for Jill is clear and interesting: Does such a man deserve comfort? But the way Saunders frames that question troubled me, and it feels different than a simple “it didn’t work for me.” I have issues with what this book appears to be doing and how it went about doing it.

There is a recognizable Saunders cadence here: comic, antiphonal exchanges; bureaucratic metaphysics; grotesque satire that brings to mind Dante’s own rumination on post-mortal transformations. Once, this felt electrifying and felt suited to the material, but I’ve been tiring of it. It feels much less exploratory and much more rote and simple.

Take the mock debate between two ghosts who, in life, were compatriots of our oil tycoon:

What matters to us, said R. Is all the good work we three did together.

In the name of science, said G.

And they let loose a peal of hellish cackling laughter.

Is it lying when one knows how one wants things to turn out and then says what is needed to achieve that result? said R.

Lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communication to thrash his opponents by redirecting the attention of the general populace, thus infecting the people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt? said G.

Doesn’t every idea, said R., even those judged by some standards to be fallacious or those which have been disproven out-right, deserve to be honored with the public’s attention?

Doesn’t the public have the right to know? said G.

And decide for itself? said R.

Are you calling the public stupid? said G.

Do you not believe in democracy? said R.

As on point as this exchange is when it comes to my own frustrations with public discourse, it, and many other exchanges like it, felt predictable. The satire lands right where we expect it to land, and then moves on to another broad point.

But there is a larger problem: the moral stakes never escape this predictability. The oil tycoon is monstrous in a way that requires no interpretive work from the reader. Though Vigil’s ghostly visitations to spur change might echo A Christmas Carol, this contemporary greedy monster isn’t Scrooge, whose inhumanity emerges from a distorted but coherent moral code that many of us actually hold. For this oil tycoon, we are allowed to feel morally superior without risk.

Perhaps that’s fine, because this is not his story. It’s Jill’s. She’s the one ruminating on her directive to comfort even people who, we assume, don’t deserve it. And so more interesting, at least potentially, is Jill’s meditation on her murderer, Paul Bowman. Here is the thought process that allows her to let go of any anger, and any judgment, and do her job:

At what precise moment could Paul Bowman have become other-than-Paul-Bowman?

And how? How was the change, the opting out, the departure from the formed-in-the-womb, the choosing to be other than what one was, supposed to occur, precisely?

He had been done badly, by fate, from the beginning, having been born with certain disadvantages (limited intelligence, crude features, an almost nonexistent sense of curiosity), and then, as he grew, had acquired a host of concomitant disadvantages, such as: a strange, aggressive manner of speaking, a pre-disposition to be offended, regrettable taste in clothing, and a tendency to slip too easily into mindless reactive violence.

Here Saunders has Jill lean into a determinism that verges on fatalism. The capacity to change is described elsewhere as “baked in,” predetermined. One’s ability to alter one’s own moral trajectory is itself fixed.

That’s an interesting philosophical question. But here it felt less like a moment of inquiry and more like resignation. If our capacity for change is “baked in,” for Jill compassion becomes the only logical response. Her directive is, “Comfort, for all else is futility.” For me that sounds less like humane mercy and more like surrender.

Putting aside my fatigue with the banal but quirky style, this philosophical point is where the book falters for me. Saunders allows readers to feel as though we are engaging with a difficult moral problem: is there room for compassion toward the unrepentant architect of catastrophe? The oil tycoon is granted opportunities at the brink of death to feel regret and, Jill pleads, to relinquish ego. Will he? Won’t he? But if Jill’s theory is correct, it shouldn’t matter because he cannot meaningfully become other than he is. And yet the ending compels us toward mercy while still delivering a sense of justice. The reader is allowed to have their cake and eat it too.

And so I find myself wondering whether the book, whose apparent purpose is to ask us to be humane, has a deeper purpose: simply to comfort us. Rather than truly ask us to engage in moral tension it resolves it with moral consolation. To me, that resolution directs us away from change and towards complacency.

Early Saunders felt vital because he exposed the fragility of American moral language and the ways cultural systems have warped our humanity. Here, the story seems designed to reinforce the moral framework his readers already bring with them. In the end, it flatters our compassion. I want fiction to push harder to unsettle my moral instincts, not reassure them.