Maureen Corrigan

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, "...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.

It's a particularly bleak January, reason enough for literary escape.