Maureen Corrigan

If heaven, according to the talking heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday.

We Saunders fans have been to the bardo before, that suspended state between life and death, where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next.

Saunders set much of his magnificent 2017 debut novel, Lincoln in the Bordeaux, in the actual mausoleum and surrounding cemetery where in February of 1862, Abraham Lincoln sat cradling the body of his 11-year-old son Willie, who died of typhoid fever.

In Saunders' rendering, the Lincoln Pieta sits at the center of a crowd of Bardo dwellers, cracking crude jokes, demanding attention, exuding empathy, nastiness, indifference.

In short, dead people behaving like exaggerated versions of their living selves.

The enlightenment that some of these dead achieve is what the novel also delivered for many of us readers.

a deepened sense, however momentary, of the mystery of existence.

Vigil is a briefer and bumpier return visit back to the Bordeaux.

Instead of the mythic grief of Abraham Lincoln, here we have the passing of one somewhat mundane, if contemptible, human being.

K.J.

Boone was, and for a few more hours still is, an oil company CEO.

To Boone, corporate greed and fossil fuels power the engine of American capitalism, and he sees nothing wrong with the way things are.

In fact, to keep profits soaring, he went so far as to falsify facts about scientific research.

Think Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life for the climate change era.

Plummeting down into Boone's palatial bedroom from a more elevated spiritual realm is a woman named Jill Doll Blaine.

Doll was Jill's nickname before her sudden death in an explosion at 22.

In her role as spiritual facilitator, Jill has attended some 343 passings.

Her mission is to console those terrified by the transition from life to death.

She also urges the dying to undertake a final review of their lives, but Boone isn't buying it.

He sees nothing wrong with himself.