Book reviews: ‘Vigil: A Novel’ and ‘Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage’

‘Vigil: A Novel’ by George Saunders

George Saunders’ slim new novel is “a strikingly weird work of modern
fiction,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Like Lincoln in the Bardo, the author’s 2017 Booker Prize winner, Vigil concerns the liminal space between life and death, yet this story “seems to have risen up from the loamy soil of medieval allegory.” As K.J. Boone, former CEO of the world’s largest oil company, lies on his deathbed, he’s visited by various ghosts, including two...