Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Eva Pentel

NW The novel revisits several of the preoccupations present in your first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). Vigil places us back in a similar kind of holding zone. Why?

GS I can make the case for why those are philosophical concerns of mine but in truth, it’s really more something like an aesthetic choice. When I allow a ghost to come in, things get a little bigger, and they get funnier, too. I need that excitement to actually write the pages. It has something to do with letting omniscience in there, letting a contrary voice in. What if a guy who did really bad things is living the last day of his life? That’s fine, but it’s also familiar. If I put a ghost in, suddenly time flies by.

NW Do both books take place in the same universe?

GS I don’t think so. Originally, I thought that would be kind of cool, but it doesn’t seem to be true. In Vigil, for example, they all know that they’re dead. I had to say to myself, it’s a nice idea, but it’s a writerly idea that’s going to inhibit this book. I have a third book in mind, and if each of the three universes is different, that would make a nice triptych – three different afterlives that are related, but not identical.

NW I was thinking about The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), another deathbed story. The philosopher Merold Westphal writes that, in Tolstoy’s novella, death is an enemy: it drives self-deception, drains life of meaning and isolates the dying person. In Vigil, death is the opposite. It becomes a vast communion with everyone who has ever died. How do you bring in those overwhelming voices?

GS I once read a study that said that at the end of their lives, people get kind of porous. There’s a really wonderful book by Patricia Pearson where she cites some examples of people in an end-of-life state, and who saw beings from their past, and in some cases, those beings gave the dying person information they couldn’t have otherwise known. Also, I love doing voices. As a little kid in Chicago, you could get some credibility by imitating a teacher, but the highest watermark was if you could make somebody up from scratch, and stay in that made-up character for most of the day.

NW A central idea that weaves through the novel is denial, for instance, climate denial – a specific form of denial born out of an inability to accept truths that are inconvenient, frightening or that get in the way of shareholder profits. Boone is also in denial of his imminent death. What role does denial play in the novel?

GS Well, he’s in denial for sure, but so is Jill. She really doesn’t like the idea that it’s over for her. With Boone, I wanted to make him more interesting, so then you have to give part of yourself to him. If I had done this, how would I go about making it OK? First, you attack your enemy, and then you develop more sophisticated defences. I was in the oil business when I was younger – I was in Asia as an explorationist, and it was so glamorous. I was a working-class person who went to a hard school and got a great job travelling overseas, and I felt pretty good about it. But denial works in many ways. I was writing a story once for which I drove the length of the Mexican border, and I met a comical little right-wing group that called itself the “Minutemen”. They’d stake out the border to try to catch “illegals”, though they were far too noisy to have any success at it. I was hanging around with one of the few women in the group, and there were so many inappropriate sexual jokes at her expense all day. Finally, I said, “Does it bother you, this sexist joking?” She was adamant that it didn’t – it’s not real. It doesn’t affect me. I’m stronger than that. It’s also a fear of engaging – if I admit that that sexist joke bothers me, the floodgates open, and there’s no end. If Boone understands what he’s done, his whole life is fucked. Literally every meal he took was in the service of the destruction of the world.

NW It’s humane, too. I found the depiction of life in the novel to be heartbreaking – mostly because it is really nothing grand, but rather an accumulation of detail.

GS I often think about that part in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which he’s coming to grips with the idea that he’s going to die. He says something along the lines of, I can’t be dying – I who knows the smell of that little striped leather ball? That part kills me. 

NW There’s this amazing moment in the novel where all of these quotation marks creep in. She’s remembering “being kissed by Lloyd, for ‘very first time’, at ‘stock car race’ at ‘Raceway Park’, and all at once the ‘bleacher seats’ beneath us seemed to fall away and my hand was on his ‘blue-jeaned leg’, there beside ‘mustard stain.’”

GS The first time I used those quote marks, I wasn’t quite sure why I was using them, but then I realised that they mark the halfway point between Jill and the eternal. It’s a dead person looking back, saying, “We had a thing called ‘Christmas Day’.” One of the challenges of the book became working out when those quotes were appropriate, and when they weren’t. Jill’s inconsistent in her usage because it’s flickering on and off in her mind. But I love that idea that you can use punctuation not only to communicate meaning but to discover it, because that was part of my process of seeing that she was in transition. Every time I took them out, something went flat. So then you say, OK, well, what are you trying to tell me, book? It also exposes an act of faith between me, the writer, and you, the reader, because I put them there with a lot of care and a lot of reworking – and you saw it. First, you feel it viscerally as you’re reading, and it confirms something that you’ve already got going on as a reader. That means that we’re really at a high level of communication. If I tried to explain it to you, it would be a little bit idiotic, but what fiction can do uniquely is deliver it to you to see and experience without fully recognising it at first.  

NW What do you think we’ll find when we die?

RT It’s an uninformed view, but I think there’s an intense experience that could be quite long, depending on what your mind is doing, and that would probably have something to do with the habits that you cultivate in this life. A Buddhist teaching says, “Call the Guru from afar”, and Christians say, “Call out to Jesus.” In that period of visions, if you can train yourself to recognise that those are mental constructs, then they can convert. That might just be a metaphor for practice, too. Death is a mental phenomenon, but so is everything. .