George Saunders. Photo: Pat Martin
“As I’m getting older,” says George Saunders, “I’m thinking maybe I should write a lot more and talk a lot less.” He’s currently promoting his second novel (and 13th book overall), Vigil, which means he’s expected to produce tidy answers to chewy conundrums about guilt, blame, mercy and free will that took him two years and 192 pages to explore. “The answer should be: see book,” Saunders laughs, sitting in his Santa Monica apartment. “The book exists to have you ask those questions. I can’t talk at as high a level as I can write.”
While it’s true that Saunders, 67, writes more eloquently than he talks, he talks more eloquently than just about anyone. A practising Buddhist with a gruff, friendly voice and the appearance of an ex-hippie professor, he shuns canned responses and glib simplifications to try to get to the heart of things.
In 2013, Saunders delivered a commencement address at Syracuse University in New York on the theme of becoming less selfish and more open to the world. The speech went viral and was expanded into a bestselling book called Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, which was odd for someone whose short stories were bitingly satirical. Like Kurt Vonnegut before him, he has become a kind of moral celebrity, famous as much for his humane sagacity as for his widely praised work (his admirers include Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon and Zadie Smith). The writer Joshua Ferris once claimed that Saunders “writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being.” It is in the nature of such people to feel uncomfortable about that kind of praise.
George Saunders and Zadie Smith at the 2025 New Yorker Festival in New York City. Photo: Craig Barritt/Getty
“There’s part of me that loves it,” Saunders frowns, “and there’s also part of me that sees the corrosive effect it has on me to love it, and makes me a little sick. Of course you see the way you actually live and behave and think, and you don’t want anyone to misunderstand the complexity. I don’t really want that laurel, mainly because it could fuck up my work. If I think I’m a moral celebrity and this short story is to convey morality to you, that’s a really good way to write a stupid story.”
Vigil is not a stupid story. Like 2017’s Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo (his first novel after 25 years of short stories), Vigil hovers in the anteroom between life and death, surrounding a man in pain with a chattering horde of spirits. But KJ Boone is no Abraham Lincoln. He’s an unapologetic oil tycoon who has done his darnedest to deny the reality of climate change: “a bully, a ruiner, an unrepentant world-wrecker”. On his last night on Earth, his soul’s fate is contested by two of the talking dead: the compassionate Jill Blaine, a young American woman who died violently in the 1970s, and the merciless “Frenchman”, aka Étienne Lenoir, the 19th-century inventor of the combustion engine. A tussle between absolution and condemnation ensues.
When I’m writing, my mind goes quiet… So many of my limitations as a person fall away
A series of extreme weather events in 2022 made Saunders want to write about climate change but “the climate change novel is nobody’s favourite”. So he started reading about the deniers as a way in. He realised that they represented an extreme version of the self-justifying narratives people tell themselves to avoid reckoning with the consequences of their actions. “Habit being what it is, and fear being what it is, there must be a lot of people who go to their graves defiantly not repentant,” he figures.
We’re talking a few days after Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. I admit to Saunders that I feel as unforgiving as the Frenchman when I see JD Vance shamelessly smearing Good and valorising her killer. Empathy eludes me.
Saunders nods and brings up a Tibetan Buddhist concept called “idiot compassion”, “where you think compassion means being sympathetic and sweet. That’s not it. Empathy is never supposed to mean enabling.” He puts it this way: “There has to be a way to actively oppose these thugs without losing ourselves. That’s the really tricky part. I’m struggling with that more than I can tell you. What do we do in a situation like this? It’s easy to just go into full-blown hate mode. I don’t want to do that personally. But I also don’t want to be one of these people who says ‘aw, I really wish JD Vance would be more compassionate’.”
George Saunders at the Man Booker Prize reception in 2017
He scrunches his brow. “I guess I’m saying that the full empathetic understanding is not antithetical to rigorous political action.”
Saunders explored the question of opposition in his devastating 2020 short story Love Letter. Set during a future Trump autocracy, it is his most overtly political work to date. “Love Letter was for sure a yelp, but that’s what was happening,” he reasons. “If you and I wake up on a couch in an endless field of shit, for me to say we’re sitting in an endless field of shit, that’s not political. It’s just a fact.”
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, and grew up in Chicago. Both his parents are still alive and self-sufficient in their late 80s. “So that’s the stock I’m from,” he laughs. “I’m mid-career right now!” Their influence on his work is “deep, deep, deep,” but never explicit. “I have such tender feelings for my family, and such private feelings, that I don’t ever put them directly in anything. I’m sure it’s all there but it’s transmogrified into something else.”
He studied geophysical engineering in Colorado and spent a few years prospecting for oil in the jungles of Sumatra. “I had slight misgivings but I don’t remember hearing about climate change until much later.” In 1988, Saunders earned an MFA from Syracuse, where he met his wife, Paula, but he didn’t publish his first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, until he was a 37-year-old father of two working as a technical writer for an engineering firm. He had stopped imitating his heroes and found his own voice: very strange, very funny, full of surprises. He wrote satirical allegories about dystopian regimes, sinister corporations, brain-warping pharmaceuticals and how to remain human in dehumanising conditions. His stories demand a certain commitment: at first disorienting, they become transporting. Saunders believes in “understating in the assumption of shared intelligence”. “Part of that is knowing that some people don’t want to [commit], and that’s fine. You have to let some readers go.”
Cognitive degradation is everywhere and I think that the [Trump] administration is using that to its advantage. I feel that it’s related to phones and to the internet.
Plenty chose to stick around. In 2006, Saunders received the MacArthur “genius grant”. In 2013, the Syracuse speech and his collection Tenth of December made this “writer’s writer” a mainstream phenomenon. In 2017, Lincoln in the Bardo scooped the Booker. With that book, he found a new emotional openness and clarity. “I was doing a ton of meditation,” he says. “When I was writing a given passage I could feel the sarcastic or edgy imperative back off a little bit. In [Vigil], the sections where KJ Boone is thinking about his childhood are somewhat akin to that: be quiet, let him talk for a minute.”
There’s a crucial line in Saunders’s 2021 story The Mom of Bold Action: “You are trapped in you.” He is fascinated by fleeting moments of altered perception, when transcendence seems possible. As a Catholic child, he would sometimes be “quite transported into a holy little guy and then it wore off”. It happened again the first time he took LSD and “stepped out for just a second into this acid space”. Most intensely, about 25 years ago, the plane he was travelling on almost crashed. For the next four days, he experienced a “hyper-clarity” about his life that was “almost unbearable”. These days, he can sometimes attain that state of not-self through writing. “When I’m writing, my mind goes quiet, I find the characters saying things I wouldn’t have imagined, the narrative gets denser. That’s a form of self-abnegation. So many of my limitations as a person fall away.”
Writing being a solitary pursuit, Saunders also likes to teach. For decades he has led a creative writing class at Syracuse. Now he’s extended his reach via his 2021 book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a writing masterclass based on close reading of writers such as Tolstoy and Chekhov, and his Substack, Story Club, which has more than 300,000 subscribers. “It’s a nice way of communicating a little more directly than fiction lets you. [I’m] really trying to be a good host to the reader: come here, we’re going to talk about this. Like leaning over an engine we’re trying to fix.”
Saunders teaches people how to write better, but also how to read better. He worries that we’re moving into a post-literate society. “There’s all these studies that indicate that if you aren’t able to follow a long narrative or argument, then it actually does affect your empathy. That cognitive degradation is everywhere and I think that the administration is using that to its advantage. I feel that it’s related to phones and to the internet.”
Saunders has suggested in the past that engagement with literature is therefore morally improving but he’s backing away from that idea. “If you get too invested in claiming that fiction helps people, then an autocratic regime can say, well, that fiction’s not helping anybody.” He paraphrases the late critic Dave Hickey: “You always have to keep in the front of your mind that art has no purpose. It’s just free.” And this is why George Saunders doesn’t want to be the guy with all the answers. “We don’t know what art does but we like it, and we’re going to keep doing it, and” – he grins – “fuck you.”
Vigil by George Saunders is out now (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
Dorian Lynskey is a journalist, broadcaster and author who co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize. Dorian reviews theatre for the Nerve.