There are some grounds for saying that the central myth of the American Century (1945-present) can be found in a movie released in that century’s first full year: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The movie takes place in a small New York town called Bedford Falls. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, who wants to travel the world (he briefly considers a job in the “Venezuelan oil fields”), but who puts his own needs aside to run his late father’s Building and Loan. Embittered by his life of sacrifice, George contemplates suicide. But Heaven intervenes. An angel called Clarence descends to Earth to show George what Bedford Falls would be like if he had never lived.
It’s at this point that Capra’s superbly wrought weepie becomes something stranger and darker. Without George Bailey, Bedford Falls becomes a sleazy, agonistic dystopia called Pottersville, owned and run by the slumlord Henry F Potter (“He hates anybody that has anything he can’t have”). The ending, riffing on A Christmas Carol, reconciles George to the meaning of his existence. But the film doesn’t quite seem to grasp what it has really said: that the gap between sunny communitarianism and social decay under tyranny is no wider than the razor’s edge of one man’s life.
Why do we automatically acknowledge this as a deeply American story? Because the US is a country with a destiny. And a destiny can always be missed. Fate can hinge on the smallest choice. Pottersville or Bedford Falls: these are the American stakes. It’s a Wonderful Life still haunts the American imagination. Back to the Future Part II (1989), with its alternate timeline in which the Trumpian Biff Tannen desecrates the bucolic California town of Hill Valley, is a retelling of Capra’s film. In Adelle Waldman’s recent novel about the collapse of the American social contract, Help Wanted, the de-industrialised city in which the characters eke out their constrained lives is called Potterstown.
And now US’s most recent Booker winner, George Saunders, has produced his own riff on the story of George Bailey. Like Capra’s film, Vigil is a superbly wrought bit of sentimental fantasy that shades gradually into something darker and more troubling. It’s a short book, smoothly readable, funny and self-consciously late, in several senses. That is to say, it’s a late retelling of an American myth, and it is about lateness. Indeed, it is about too-lateness, literally and otherwise.
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Like Capra, Saunders works with angels. Vigil is narrated by one such angel: Jill Blaine, who materialises, as the book begins, above the Texas mansion of KJ Boone, and briefly finds herself stuck in “the asphalt crust of a semicircular drive”. Becoming more substantial, but passing spectrally through doors, Jill arrives at Boone’s deathbed. Unseen and unheard by anyone but Boone, she is there to comfort him as he dies of cancer: “For this was the work our great God in Heaven had given me.”
It is not an easy task. In fact, it might be impossible. (It might be too late.) Born to a poor working Texas family, Boone grew up to become not just an oil man, but the oil man: the man, in Saunders’s telling, who did the most “to suppress and deny the evidence of the harm” that his industry was causing to the planet. Boone is an extractor, a despoiler. He has no regrets – at least, none that he is aware of.
Other angels torment him: a 19th-century French man who invented the internal combustion engine (never named, but presumably Étienne Lenoir) and has posthumously repented; climate-denying scientists Mel G and Mel R, in death a bantering double-act out of Beckett or Dr Seuss. Will Boone repent? Accept his part in the wrecking of the Earth? Can Jill console him?
A cute fable – or so it seems. But look again. Jill claims to be working for God. But God never appears. All we know is that Jill lives a kind of afterlife, in which she returns repeatedly to the mind and body of the man who murdered her when she was 22 years old. And even if Boone repents, isn’t it too late? The damage is done. The book is full of images of a depleted world, haunted by ghosts telling themselves the same stories compulsively. The story Jill tells about herself – that she is an angel, bringing comfort to the dying – may be structurally no different from the lies Boone tells about his contributions to human progress.
Vigil, it transpires, may really be about the ways in which we rationalise our lives, fates, choices, when all is, as Jill sadly tells Boone towards novel’s end, “Too late”. What happens when the final chance is missed? The answer, of course, is Pottersville: where Americans now live. This bleak, sharp book is a novel of too late – a novel of the moment when all that remains are stories.
Kevin Power is an author and assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
