Vigil is George Saunders’ first novel in nine years, and his second novel to deal with a thorny existential theme: What happens to us after we die? For Saunders—a Buddhist who was raised Catholic—it’s a question he’s been thinking about for years.

“I think of it a lot, in a fearful sense, for sure,” the author says during a Zoom conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s a mechanical way of saying, You and I are sitting here talking, but also you have all the memories of people you’ve loved who passed. Those people are still giving us advice, maybe they’re criticizing us or praising us. I found that if I can get a little bit of excitement, then the book can go well. And whenever I think of dead people in the room, I think, Oh, that’s fun. Who are they?”

Vigil, to be published on Jan. 27 by Random House, opens with a figure plunging toward Earth, crashing into an asphalt driveway at a breakneck velocity. It’s the kind of fall that would certainly kill any mortal person—but then Jill “Doll” Blaine isn’t mortal. She is otherworldly; a woman who died young years before and is now charged with comforting those about to die and escorting them to the afterlife.

The dying man on her current mission is K. J. Boone, an oil baron who has reached the end of his road. But Jill finds that her job is more complex than she bargained for—Boone won’t repent for his crimes against the environment, because he doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a novel that feels deeply resonant, especially in these fractious times.”

The theme recalls Saunders’ previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which also explored the space between life and whatever comes after. (It won the Booker Prize in 2017.) The two books, though, are very different, and Saunders acknowledges, happily, that this one stretched him.

“It was just that whole process of thinking, Is this going to be as grand of a book as Lincoln?” he says. “And you think, Well, maybe not. All right, that’s OK. That’s a stretch, because if you’re somebody like me, I always want to top everything I’ve done. So it was a stretch to say, Let’s be content with what it is and hope it’s great.”

Saunders can’t recall the moment he came up with the idea for Vigil, but, he says, “I know it had something to do with getting older and looking back at your life and seeing all the different people you’ve been that you wouldn’t necessarily endorse, weird mullets and whatever.”

He drew upon his own background in the oil industry to craft Boone, a childish, unrepentant, and resolutely unlikable man who couldn’t be more different from Saunders himself.

He acknowledges that he had some difficulty getting into Boone’s mindset but adds, “My theory is we all have everybody within us. You’re not really becoming him, but you’re saying, OK, do I, George, have anything that I’m deeply, probably dysfunctionally, proud of? Yes, my writing career. I can draw on that. Do I have a memory of being part of an oil community? That was cool and exciting, and I had a lot of pride in that. OK, you bring that in. Do I have a fear of death? Oh, boy. So what you’re doing is assembling a person from bits of yourself that you then crank up or down depending on how you need them.”

Saunders also says that the book was inspired by nonfiction reading he had done, including Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming and Steve Coll’s Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.

“I noticed that the generation of people who stalled the climate change debate back in the ’90s were getting older, and some of them were still pretty defensive and defiant, and some were genuinely repentant as the weather started to change,” he said. “I thought it was interesting: Can people repent for something and if not, why don’t they? When you get to that point in your life where you’re old and sick and weak, you can see there’s a branch point. Some people are all in on I’m sorry, I wish I had done better, please forgive me. Other people harden up and are defiant.”

Boone belongs squarely in the latter camp, never admitting that he made the world worse. “As I was writing, I did a lot of work on the layers by which he gets closer and closer to admitting his sin, and then pulls back," he says. “I did a lot of work-up on the actual steps. If I break a glass, first, I say, Who put that glass in that vulnerable location? Then you go, OK, I did. Then you say, Well, I can’t help it. I’m really busy and I’m not focusing, because I’m overworked. He’s been doing this his whole life. He’s developed a story and he’s sticking to it.”

Until Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders had been known mostly for his story collections, including his debut book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and Tenth of December. But he always knew Vigil would be a short novel.

“It was like when you’re packing your suitcase and you deliberately chose a small suitcase. All right, well then, you’ve got to jam some stuff in,” he says. “I really wanted it to be under 200 pages. I had the feeling that a short novel is what this was meant to be.”

He also knew it would be experimental. “Somebody once asked Tobias Wolff about realism versus experimentalism, and he said, ‘Well, why would I ever want to write something that wasn’t an experiment?’ He changed the frame. Of course, everything’s an experiment. Even if it looks like realism, it better not be the realism you previously did, or you’re just treading water. You have to abandon the idea of mastery. I think you have to go in really humbly and say, OK, I hope you’re a book. I hope you kick my ass. I hope I’m smart enough to take your instruction.”

Saunders is going on a book tour for Vigil—a long one, with 17 dates and stops all across the country. He says that despite the length (and the fact that he’ll have to be away from his beloved dog), he’s looking forward to it.

“When Tenth of December came out, there was a big tour, and it was tough,” he says. “I’d never done anything like it before. The pace was hard and the repetition was kind of obnoxious. I was complaining to this Buddhist friend of mine, and he said, Oh, what a party for you. He used the word pūjā, which is a ceremonial thing that we do, like a mass, basically. I thought, Oh, yeah, of course. This is a chance for you to share with other people, and it’s a chance for you to see how full of shit you are at any given moment, and try to correct it.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.