A knock-off Pynchon without the punchline: George Saunders’ Vigil falls flat

By Tamlyn Avery, Lecturer in English Literature, Adelaide University

From Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood to Barack Obama and the editors of Time magazine, it seems everyone who is anyone is lining up to sing the praises of George Saunders.

Saunders is the author of Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a ghost story about the grief of Abraham Lincoln after losing his son, whose undead spirit becomes restless. The success of that novel has somewhat overshadowed the longer career of a talented…

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