George Saunders' 'Vigil' is a brief and bumpy return to the Bardo

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Before we get started, a heads-up that today's interview includes a discussion of sexual assault.

It's been eight years since Matt Lauer was fired from NBC at the height of the #MeToo movement. In the years since, public attention has shifted, and some of the men who were forced out during the reckoning are beginning to test whether there's a way back. According to reports, Matt Lauer is one of them. Today, we're hearing from one of the women whose allegations helped bring his career to an end. For 20 years, Lauer was the most trusted man in morning television. Hundreds gathered outside of Rockefeller Center in New York each morning for a glimpse of him and his co-hosts, while millions more watched at home as he sat on the "Today Show" couch interviewing presidents, celebrities and everyday Americans. At the height of his power, NBC paid him $25 million a year, more than any other news anchor in the country. But behind the scenes, there were complaints, rumors and an atmosphere of fear.

In his 2019 book "Catch And Kill," journalist Ronan Farrow documented a pattern in which Lauer pursued women on staff at NBC over the course of decades. One of those women was Brooke Nevils, who was in her late 20s and working with former "Today" show co-anchor Meredith Vieira on NBC's coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. According to her account, first reported by Farrow, one night after drinks with colleagues at a hotel bar, she went to Lauer's room. There, she says, he sexually assaulted her, an allegation Lauer denies. Nevils did not report what she says happened at the time. She has said that she was terrified of Lauer's power and of what coming forward could mean for her career. But as the #MeToo movement gained momentum, following the public downfall of Harvey Weinstein, Nevils went to human resources, and Lauer was fired. Now nearly a decade since she came forward about the alleged assault, Brooke Nevils is telling her story in her own words in a new memoir called "Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame And The Stories We Choose To Believe." Brooke Nevils, welcome to FRESH AIR.

BROOKE NEVILS: Thank you so much for having me.

MOSLEY: Well, one of the first questions I actually have for you is the length of time between Matt Lauer's firing and you writing this book. Matt Lauer was fired in 2017, and now we're several years later beyond that point. Why did it take you this long to write this book?

NEVILS: Well, I talked to nearly two dozen experts. I talked to people who have been through sexual harassment and assault, people who have been accused of sexual harassment and assault. I spoke with someone in prison on a sexual assault charge. I cared very deeply to try and understand all sides of this issue and why this continues to happen. And it took me some time. It was very hard to really be able to see it because when you're in it, you can't see it at all. And it took me a long time to get to a point where I could approach this honestly and ask and answer the kind of hard questions that I felt needed to be asked.

At the height of #MeToo, when I made the complaint, I remember in the aftermath of that, I would sit in the trainings, and I felt afraid to ask questions. It felt like if you had these questions, you were part of the problem or you were complicit. And here I was in the middle of it. I'd made this complaint that became one of the highest-profile stories of the #MeToo era. And I had these questions, and I was afraid to ask them. So I felt we needed some time and distance to be able to really speak honestly about these things.

MOSLEY: Well, before we get into the details of your experience with Matt Lauer, I actually want to go back a little bit and understand who you were back then. Can you explain for us what your job was at NBC and how you ended up actually in Sochi covering the Olympics?

NEVILS: Sure. I was one of those kids who grew up watching the "Today" show every morning before school. I grew up in St. Louis, and when "Today" would come on and you heard that opening music, it felt like you were transported to the center of the world, where everything was happening. And I saw those people as my family. When I was growing up, it was Matt, Katie, Ann and Al, and it felt like family to me.

So I, you know, went to college. I studied journalism. I interned in journalism. And then when I graduated, by some miracle, I got into the NBC Page Program, which is a foot in the door for the television industry that I never quite could believe that I had gotten there. I had no connections in media. It really felt like a miracle. And while I was in the Page Program, I was assigned to "The Today Show." From there, I met Meredith Vieira. I eventually became her assistant and her associate producer. And that's what I was doing when we were in Sochi. So I was mainly there just as a talent assistant.

MOSLEY: Take us to that night in Sochi. So you all were at a hotel bar. You and Meredith Vieira - you all are celebrating because she had actually just found out she'd be anchoring the Olympics. And if I take folks back to that time period, if you remember, Bob Costas, who had always done this coverage, had actually gotten pink eye. So he couldn't be the main - the principal anchor for the Olympics that season. And so you and Meredith are having a drink, and Matt Lauer walks through, spots the both of you and joins you. Describe what the vibe was like. What do you remember about his demeanor that evening?

NEVILS: There was sort of this atmosphere of the surreal. We were in Russia, which is a strange experience in and of itself. Bob Costas, this legend of Olympic broadcasting, to be felled by pink eye of all possible things, for Meredith to then have this incredible opportunity to solo anchor and to do it and to do an amazing job. We went to celebrate afterwards. And at that point, we had been in Sochi for weeks. Sochi was a pretty small Olympics. It was a small team there, so we had camaraderie. And when Matt came in, you know, he isn't typically a person that you bump into around town that joins you. And so we saw him. We were celebrating, and he came over and sat with us. And I felt like it couldn't possibly be real. These were two people that I had admired as journalists, as people, since I was a little girl. And I truly could not believe I was sitting there with a seat at the table with them. And I think I got carried away, and...

MOSLEY: And when you say you got carried away, what do you mean?

NEVILS: Well, now, you know, I'm a boring mom in my 40s. So when I say that I had too much to drink, I - you know, you look back at your 20s, and I can't believe that I, you know, I was having a glass of wine. And when we were celebrating, we were in Russia. You know, Matt ordered some vodka shots, and I did them. I did them without even thinking about it because I was celebrating. I was having fun. It just seemed like this thing that could not even be real. And I was so honored to be there that, you know, I threw caution to the wind.

MOSLEY: Yeah. You know, Brooke, in the book, you write about what happened after those drinks in the hotel room, in Matt's hotel room, in such detail. And it is hard to read, and I know it had to be even harder to write. You could've summarized it. You could've gestured toward what happened and moved on, but you didn't. You took us through moment by moment, what he said, what you said, what your body felt. Why was it important for you that we know those details?

NEVILS: What was important to me was to acknowledge how complicated it was, how confusing it was, how I came to be in that room in the first place and how these things really happen. Because when we're talking about something difficult, something painful, I think the human impulse is to make it easy to understand, is to simplify it and kind of make it more black-and-white so it's easier to talk about. But the point of talking about this is to acknowledge just how devastating and confusing these things are, how quickly it happens, how you react in the moment.

And reaction is really the right word. It's more a reaction than a choice. And when you look back on it later, you second-guess absolutely every single move that you made without really understanding what happened. Because in the aftermath of sexual harassment, of sexual assault, you're always looking to give the benefit of the doubt, especially when it's someone you know. You don't want this horrible thing to have happened. You want things to be OK. So you blame yourself as a way of convincing yourself you were in control the whole time.

MOSLEY: Brooke, let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Brooke Nevils. She's a former NBC producer whose allegations against Matt Lauer led to his firing from the "Today" show in 2017. Her new memoir is called "Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, And The Stories We Choose To Tell (ph)." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with Brooke Nevils about her new memoir, "Unspeakable Things," in which she gives her full account of what happened between her and Matt Lauer. At the time, Nevils was in her late 20s and an assistant to Meredith Vieira, as well as a producer, when she alleges that Lauer sexually assaulted her during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Her complaint to NBC led to Lauer's firing at the height of the #MeToo movement. Lauer has denied her account. Now, nearly a decade later, Nevils has written her own story, and in it, she examines the systems of power and silence that allowed the abuse to continue for years.

I want to take a moment to talk about the language we're using when we're talking about this. So without asking you to relive every moment, can you help listeners understand what you say happened in that room and why you describe it specifically as assault? Because Ronan Farrow writes that when you went to NBC, you unambiguously described a rape. That is his read on what you shared, but you weren't ready to use that word yourself.

NEVILS: That's very common. That's very true. Rape is a word I hardly ever use because when you hear the word rape, you think of a guy in a ski mask in a dark alley and fighting for your life. And that's just not the reality of how sexual assaults happen. When most of the time, it's someone that you know and trust. So we don't really have language to talk about this, and we certainly didn't when, you know, in 2017, when I was reporting it.

And it takes a very long time to really process and get to the point where you can talk about it in those terms. And those terms are devastating. When you say sexual assault, when you say rape, your life changes. You have a target on your back. Every single thing that you say or that you don't say becomes evidence.

MOSLEY: Matt Lauer has described that night very differently. He used words like mutual, consensual, enthusiastic. And those were actually words that you yourself used at certain points throughout the years before you came to understand. When did your understanding of what happened start to shift?

NEVILS: In the aftermath of a sexual assault, which is a loss of power and control - that's really what it is. You realize that you are powerless and something scary is happening, and you're trying to cling to whatever control you have. So part of reclaiming that control is telling yourself it wasn't that bad. It was a misunderstanding. It was anything but the devastating thing that is a sexual assault.

And in my particular situation, the power differential was as extreme as it could possibly be. When your job is to work with the talent, when these are people who have to be kept happy, who their opinion of you can make or break your career, annoying them can mean you're never allowed on a set again. That changes the dynamic of every single interaction that you have. And another part of that is that any attention that they give you professionally, you feel is a positive thing that you are lucky to get. And people who are in power know they're in power. That's something that they wield every single day. So when you're a person in power and you ask someone less powerful to do something, you have the responsibility to think about whether they are able to say no, whether they will feel comfortable saying no, whether they can be penalized for saying no. And we always talk about fight or flight, but the most common reaction to being scared or nervous is freezing. You know, it's called tonic immobility. And we go back and we blame ourselves for that. You know, why did I just freeze? Why didn't I say anything? Why was I so complacent? Why was I being so deferential? Well, you're doing that as a way of trying to maintain control.

MOSLEY: I want to get back to the language thing a little bit because I think it's just really important. You spend a lot of time on it in the book. And I bring up what Matt said happened because he continually refers to it as an affair. For some time, you talked about it as an affair. But when you read the story from your point of view, it wasn't even transactional. There was nothing romantic about it. There wasn't even anything - it didn't even read like a hookup, where there are two people who mutually agree, we're going to just meet and have this, you know, this liaison that we have. You talked about the difference between consent and agreement. And can you explain that distinction? Because I think it's at the heart of why these cases are so confusing to people.

NEVILS: I mean, the term affair, you know, an affair is something that happens between two equals. You know, both people are equally empowered to participate. And that is not what happens in a, you know, quote, "relationship" between a subordinate and someone with power over them. And to your point, you know, yes, I refer to it as an affair because I had no idea what else to call it. A powerful person having an affair with an underling during this time was not that shocking. And you know it wasn't that shocking because I could tell people about it and they didn't, you know, think it was a very big deal.

MOSLEY: And they didn't think it was a very big deal because they had heard rumors. You talk about this in the book, too, rumors of other, quote-unquote, "affairs."

NEVILS: Right. And if you went around, you know, saying something shocking, like, oh, I was exploited. Oh, this was incredibly degrading. You know, that is not a safe thing to say in an environment where you need to remain employed, where this person still has tremendous power. But consent and agreement are not synonymous. And that's, you know, when Matt Lauer, you know, when he uses the word consensual, well, when one person has power over the other, it's not really consent. It's submission.

So when you're a subordinate and the most powerful person in your industry asks you to come to his hotel room, which in our industry, hotel rooms aren't, you know, hotel rooms the way they are in a social sense, you know, for other people. We work in hotel rooms all the time. I'd been to his hotel room already for, you know, a rehearsal. I'd been there earlier that night. You know, they're not freighted places the way they are in other industries. But, you know...

MOSLEY: You do work there when you're out on assignment.

NEVILS: You work. Yeah, you work there. But when someone asks you to go who has power over you, you're thinking about the consequences of saying no. Well, I don't want to make this weird. I don't want to make them mad. So you just go. And are you really empowered in that situation? I don't think that you are.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is Brooke Nevils. Her new memoir is "Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, And The Stories We Choose To Believe." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE TONY RICE UNIT'S "SHENANDOAH")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and we're continuing our conversation with Brooke Nevils, the former NBC producer whose allegations against "Today" show host Matt Lauer led to his 2017 firing. Around the same time, several other highly powerful and respected men were also accused of sexual misconduct, including Charlie Rose, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly and Louis C.K. In her new memoir, "Unspeakable Things," Nevils writes about in detail what she says happened between her and Matt Lauer in a hotel room in Sochi, Russia, and the years of silence and personal reckoning that followed.

You went to Meredith Vieira, who had been your boss for many years, and she told you to go to HR with a lawyer. And you did that, also knowing what reporting would cost you. You couldn't live with this anymore. You felt like you were a fraud. You were drowning in your own addiction. But you also describe it as committing career suicide - that your career in this industry that you had grown up wanting to be a part of was essentially over. And you decided to do it anyway.

NEVILS: Yeah. When I made that complaint, I mean, I knew who Matt Lauer was. I knew what he meant to the company. I knew what the "Today" show meant to millions of millions of people because I was one of those people. It meant the world to me. I knew what NBC meant to me. It was my family. It was my identity. And I knew I was breaking a sort of code, you know, by speaking up. And I assumed that the only career that would be ended by that would be mine. And I was OK with that because whatever the consequences were, I knew I could not live with the knowledge that if I didn't say something, it could continue, that it could have been continuing and that I hadn't said something.

MOSLEY: You know, Brooke, there's an assumption in journalism that when you help someone tell their story, you're serving them, and you're serving the greater good, the public. And you believe that in the work that you did as a producer, you yourself got to know sexual assault and rape victims through your journalism, through building trust with them. You thought you were on their side. And I wonder - how did your view of that work change once you were the one being interviewed?

NEVILS: Well, it changed a great deal. And the entire time I worked in journalism, I believed I was one of the good guys. I believed I was making a positive difference in the world. And part of what I do in the book is go back and look at how I covered stories about sexual harassment, stories about sexual assault. And I realized that I was perpetuating these false stereotypes that I then believed. You know, I, in a way, was part of the system that I suffered so much from at the end. And the reason I decided to write the book was because I had this moment where I had lost pretty much everything. I'd been outed by a tabloid. I barely knew myself anymore. I was drinking all the time. I felt like I'd ruined my life, and I was angry. I was, you know, saying, why did I not know about this? Why isn't the press talking about this? Why has this not been reported on when we've known for all of these years that these stereotypes are not the truth? And, you know, someone said to me, well, aren't you a journalist? Like, wasn't that your job? And it was my job. And I didn't ask the right questions. I didn't know what I didn't know.

MOSLEY: You said that you'd been so focused - this is a quote. You said, "I'd been so focused on the questions viewers want to ask that I never stepped back to consider why they wanted to ask them and what those questions said about our collective understanding of what happened to these women." Say more about that.

NEVILS: You know, we all have these sort of commonsense beliefs about how a sexual assault victim would act because so often journalists, you know, like me, we don't want to do the messy stories. We don't want to do the complicated stories. We don't want to, you know, get into the messy gray area that makes everyone uncomfortable. We're looking for sympathetic victims and stories that are easy to understand. And so when it happens to you and your story isn't easy to understand, you think you're an outlier when really, you're the norm. And I contributed to that as a journalist. And the book is, in many ways, an act of atonement for that. It's me doing the job I should have done before.

MOSLEY: A few times, you highlight details from Ronan Farrow's book, "Catch And Kill," that has your story - that you paint it as imprecise. You didn't say it was wrong. So really, what you're saying is your story is filtered through another. And with that...

NEVILS: Right.

MOSLEY: It's all about interpretation. Were there any details that were wrong, or did you just feel like it didn't quite get to all of the things that you're trying to get to in this book?

NEVILS: I wrote my own book because I knew that the only way to talk about how truly complicated, how truly frightening, how truly messy these stories are was to do it myself and was to be as honest as I could possibly be. And I knew writing this book that our standards for people who talk about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment are impossibly high. One imprecise sentence can be used to make you look like a liar. You know, did you change your story? If you leave out a detail here, you don't leave out a detail there, you know? And that's one of the reasons that it took me so long to write the book, is because this is - you know, it's called "Unspeakable Things" for a reason. Even to talk about it is still terrifying. And, I mean, why is that? My story has been out there for years, but it's never really been my story. And this is a story. My complaint was about what happened to my body. I am the primary source in that story, and yet I'm the last one to get a voice in it. Why is that? We should all pause and think about that because it is almost an impossible position to be in, even to talk about what happened to your own body, your own experience with these things. And it shouldn't be that way.

MOSLEY: You have a daughter now, and she's very young. But I wonder if you've even thought about how you plan to talk with her about the dangers of sexual assault and how it can happen.

NEVILS: You know, I talk to her about it in all sorts of ways now that she doesn't even realize that I'm talking to her about it. You know, she heard me say a bad word while I was driving, and she then said that bad word, and her brother told on her. I asked her to tell me what happened, and she said, no, I don't want to. I don't want to - I don't want you to be mad. And I said, sometimes in life, people are going to be mad at you. If you're ever going to stand up for anything, people are going to be mad at you.

Sometimes you have to tell people things they don't want to hear, and it's going to make them mad. And I know how hard that is. And I know how scary it is. But if I'm mad at you, it's not going to be the end of the world. And you will get to know that you did the right thing, that you told the truth. And I know that someday she will be old enough to read this book. My son will be old enough to read this book. They're going to go to middle school. They're going to be tortured by this book. And I thought about that because as a parent, everything you do reflects on your kids. And you never forget that.

And, you know, I'm married. I go by my married name. I don't live in New York anymore. I don't work in television anymore. It would be possible for me to bury this. But it's not my job as their mother to shield them from the hard things in life. It's my job to prepare them for the hard things in life. And part of that is giving them the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, to be honest with them and say, I wasn't perfect, but I still didn't deserve what happened to me. And I know that when I have that conversation with them, it will be hard, but it will let them make better choices than I made.

MOSLEY: Brooke Nevils, thank you so much for this book. And thank you for talking with us.

NEVILS: Thank you for having me.

MOSLEY: Brooke Nevils' new book is "Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, And The Stories We Choose To Believe." Lauer has denied her account and called their encounter an affair. After a short break, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Vigil," a new novel by George Saunders. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE NILE SONG, "I'M ON FIRE")

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Writer George Saunders is a Buddhist whose practice informs his work, most notably his 2017 novel, "Lincoln In The Bardo," which won the Booker Prize. Saunders' new novel, "Vigil," also explores the Buddhist concept of the Bardo. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: 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 Cosco 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 Bardo," 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 Bardo. 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. As one of the many Bardo dwellers who visits Boone's deathbed says, his long service to his colossal ego begins to undo him.

"Vigil" is a good but not great short novel. Boone is just too much a stereotypical captain of industry to be the abiding center of interest here. That's why the novel comes alive halfway through, when its focus turns to Jill, our flawed spiritual messenger. A wedding taking place next door to Boone's house prompts Jill to recall her former life with such longing that she risks becoming stuck in the earthly realm. Here's a moment where Jill's grandmother, known as Grandma Gust because she frequently breaks wind, whisks her off to a cemetery to see some graves that may shock her out of her nostalgia. Also buried in the cemetery are Jill's parents.

Jill says, (reading) seeing their graves was the hardest blow of all. I used to come in from playing, and there they'd be. They'd used to come in from being out somewhere, and there I'd be on the couch, maybe. And I'd jump up, so happy to see them. Once there'd been no me, and then they'd come along and made me. And now I was gone, and they were too. What was the point of it all? Grandma said, what keeps you here, doll? What keeps you here? - I said. She leaned forward to answer, as about to tell me some long-kept secret, then did a little fart like in the old days, so we might part on good terms.

That wild swirl of the bodily profane and the spiritual, the elegiac and the comical, is what makes Saunders' writing so spectacular. And thankfully, the sections where Jill takes center stage call it forth. Of course, I feel a little regretful about saying anything negative about Saunders' work, given that he's been elevated to secular sainthood ever since he gave that viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013 on the topic of kindness. Surely, the Bardo must be packed with critics, struggling to let go of ego, atoning for negative and even mixed reviews like this one.

MOSLEY: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Vigil" by George Saunders. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker on Stephen Wilson Jr., a rising country musician, who he says is writing some of the most intricate and compelling songs around these days. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF KYLE EASTWOOD'S "SAMBA DE PARIS")

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Writer George Saunders is a Buddhist whose practice informs his work, most notably his 2017 novel, "Lincoln In The Bardo," which won the Booker Prize. Saunders' new novel, "Vigil," also explores the Buddhist concept of the Bardo. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: 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 Cosco 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 Bardo," 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 Bardo. 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. As one of the many Bardo dwellers who visits Boone's deathbed says, his long service to his colossal ego begins to undo him.

"Vigil" is a good but not great short novel. Boone is just too much a stereotypical captain of industry to be the abiding center of interest here. That's why the novel comes alive halfway through, when its focus turns to Jill, our flawed spiritual messenger. A wedding taking place next door to Boone's house prompts Jill to recall her former life with such longing that she risks becoming stuck in the earthly realm. Here's a moment where Jill's grandmother, known as Grandma Gust because she frequently breaks wind, whisks her off to a cemetery to see some graves that may shock her out of her nostalgia. Also buried in the cemetery are Jill's parents.

Jill says, (reading) seeing their graves was the hardest blow of all. I used to come in from playing, and there they'd be. They'd used to come in from being out somewhere, and there I'd be on the couch, maybe. And I'd jump up, so happy to see them. Once there'd been no me, and then they'd come along and made me. And now I was gone, and they were too. What was the point of it all? Grandma said, what keeps you here, doll? What keeps you here? - I said. She leaned forward to answer, as about to tell me some long-kept secret, then did a little fart like in the old days, so we might part on good terms.

That wild swirl of the bodily profane and the spiritual, the elegiac and the comical, is what makes Saunders' writing so spectacular. And thankfully, the sections where Jill takes center stage call it forth. Of course, I feel a little regretful about saying anything negative about Saunders' work, given that he's been elevated to secular sainthood ever since he gave that viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013 on the topic of kindness. Surely, the Bardo must be packed with critics, struggling to let go of ego, atoning for negative and even mixed reviews like this one.

MOSLEY: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Vigil" by George Saunders. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker on Stephen Wilson Jr., a rising country musician, who he says is writing some of the most intricate and compelling songs around these days. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF KYLE EASTWOOD'S "SAMBA DE PARIS")

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