George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin - The New York Times

“I think there tend to be two ways to know the novelist George Saunders. One is through his amazing novels and short story collections. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is, I think, one of my favorite books of all time. The other is in his public facing role as one of America’s leading prophets, proselytizers of kindness. And this role is built on the virality of this beautiful commencement speech he gave some years ago about kindness. Who in your life do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say as a goal in life you could do worse than try to be kinder. I’ve talked to Saunders about that speech. He was on the show in 2021, in an episode that many people tell me is their favorite. And I’ve always thought of Saunders a little bit in that mode, the kindness guy. But reading his new novel “Vigil,” which is about an oil tycoon on his deathbed, being visited by angels and people from his past, trying to get him to reassess his own life. I began to realize that Saunders is more interested in something else now not kindness, but the question of judgment. Not just how do we treat others, but how do we understand our own lives. But in this book, you can feel Saunders searching for bigger, darker game. This is a book about sin and judgment. It’s about free will and whether or not we have it. And in it there is some. There’s a very fundamental tension between the side of Saunders that does not want to judge. It wants to explain who we are in terms of the conditions we came from, which is a stance of very deep compassion. And the side of him that thinks judgment is necessary, that sin needs to be recognized, and that you cannot have truth if you are not willing to open up to ideas of fundamental wrongdoing. And so I wanted to renegotiate some of these questions with Saunders. I wanted to see for him right now, in this moment, what lies beyond kindness. As always, my email [email protected] George Saunders, welcome back to the show. It’s so nice to be here Thanks for having me. So there’s a moment in your New book visual, where one of the main characters is on his deathbed. And he offers this prayer. He says, thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming, powerless nincompoop. Thank you for making me unique. One of a kind, incomparable. Victorious tell me about that prayer. Well, he’s a guy who has been driven by ambition his whole life, and it served him pretty well. He’s a big, really powerful oil executive. He had some as I imagined him, some early kind of insecurity and stillers. And then his whole life, he was working against that to try to assert himself and give himself enough power that he’d never feel that again. And he did it. And I think he’s just kind of turning to God and saying, I’m correct, aren’t I. Like, I did it right. That’s why you gave me all this power. Yes he hears God saying did great. So it’s from my perspective, a moment of extreme delusion. Where he’s getting exactly the wrong message from the moment he’s in. But from my own experience of being a person, you develop a certain approach to life to keep anxiety at Bay, to solidify your view of yourself, to make it easier to get through life. And then it’s really hard to peel that away. He has an opportunity to maybe have a different perspective on his life. And he just passes. Do you think there’s a question inside of that, a question that maybe feels very culturally relevant to me right now, which is whether the greatness that the world rewards, the power that the world offers is something to be lauded or is actually something to be feared and ashamed of. Well, I think it’s something to look askance at, even if I mean, I think everybody, to a greater or lesser extent, is involved in that of trying to get over in some way trying to push back on the natural fear that we have of being out of control and being in life. But I think what should be becoming clear to us is that if you say power is everything, if I get that power, I’m safe. That’s completely BS. And there’s not a world where one person could have so much power as to be above suffering. There just isn’t. So I think our culture is in a particular moment where we have forgotten that for various reasons. So it’s easy for politically and maybe personally to think if I just get enough of this thing, this power, then I’m safe. But that’s clearly delusional. And if this validation I was thinking about reading that you have a safer form of social acclaim. You’re a novelist and a writer and very beloved. And people quote your work on kindness. And so there’s a lot of social praise that has come into you. I have my own version of this, and it can be I think, pretty easy if you’re having a moment of self-doubt to fall back on these things. The world has told you about yourself. So I wondered, when I read this, whether any part of you identified without prayer, the feelings within it. I mean, when you write a book like this Everybody is and you both believe in them and you think they’re full of it. That’s the whole game of being a novelist. So in that part, I remember thinking, O.K, George, if you were on your deathbed and some evidence was presented that you wasted your life, what would your response be. And of course, you want to think it would be, oh, I am corrected. But in fact, what you double down, you say Yeah, but I wrote books. And so that’s a big, big danger I think for anybody and certainly for me. You the praise comes in and you accept it very happily and it inflates you. The blame comes in and you don’t accept it quite so easily and you deflect it. I find it to be the opposite, actually. Oh, no. That’s right. That’s a good point. The praise. The praise goes off the back. Well that’s true. It’s water off a duck. And then it’s like you got one mean comment and you’re thinking about it for two weeks. Yes, yes. But for sure. And one of the cool things about getting older, actually, is that you realize that everything in the universe is giving you the memo, that you’re temporary and that you’re on the way out. Your hairline, your body the way you feel. But then in a moment where you get praised, that information contradicts that somehow. And the ego goes, oh, we are important. We are permanent. I’m still growing in import. And so I was actually thinking about a different moment in your life as I was reading the book because obviously it’s about CJ Boone, an oil company CEO. But you worked early in your life as a geophysical prospector. What is a geophysical prospector? Well, I was trained at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden in that what we would do is we’d go into an area where there might be oil, and then we’d plant a dynamite charge 10 or 15 underground, blow it off, and then with of sophisticated system of sensors, we would record the sound waves as they came back up. And then that could be used in these complex computer things to predict the three dimensional topography underground, which then in turn could be used to locate Wells Yeah how did you get into that. Well, I trained for it. I mean, I was a geophysics major Yeah, I figured Yeah, yeah. I just thought I’d try. They don’t just send you out with dynamite. No and that was at that time in the 80s. That was kind of what they were teaching at the School of Mines in geophysics. So, yeah, highly mathematical and technical. And, and it was kind of I mean, one of the things that happened that was kind of life informing I was kind of a trainee and I was in a room and they were having a meeting in the next room of the higher UPS, and it became clear I could overhear it that the grid that we were using to submit our drilling recommendations and grid that the National oil company of Indonesia was using were different. So we would say drill here and they would take it onto their map and drill in a completely randomized location. And so as a conversation unfolded, I’m like, oh, everybody’s getting kind of awkwardly quiet in there. And then there was a kind of a group agreement that this was unfortunate, but it could be overlooked and it wouldn’t go any further up the line. So for 10 years they’ve been drilling, they’ve been spending millions of dollars on this information and then randomizing it and drilling anyway. And then they just decided to keep it quiet. So it was Kafka. So what was Yeah, it does sound very Kafka esque. So what was and what is your relationship to oil, to energy, to this fundamental engine of human existence and use it progress and destruction Yeah I mean, I have at that time it was very simple. I mean, it was just an adventure. And at that time, I think people weren’t really talking climate change much. There was some sense that I saw firsthand of that we were kind of running roughshod over the environment in that area and also of over the culture. We were just imperialist. But mostly for me, it was just thrilling. We would go into these rainforests where no one had ever set foot and we’d drill these or not drill, but we have the local guys cut a very narrow path and we’d go in and there were Tigers. And it was for a 22-year-old, it was a thrill. So I used that in the book just to get away into his mind somebody who feels positively about this endeavor. And I could see if I’d been a little more talented at it. I might have, become an executive. And those early feelings of tribal pride would probably have just grown and grown. I want to come back to the tribal pride, but before that. So CJ Boone, oil well, company CEO, as I mentioned. Did you research him. Is he based on anyone for you. How did you put yourself in the mind of a robber Baron of sorts, right. What I do is I research a bunch for a month. I just read everything I can find, and then I take notes, and then I just put it away. And the purpose of that is not to ever give someone’s biography or to have a real life basis, but just so that the invention is within the realm of the plausible and for the voice and the attitude. I’m always trying to find a corollary to that person in my mind. And then try to build that corollary out. So with him taking that early oil experience, also kind of superimposing my writing life, the pride I feel in that and the investment I have in that, and then just growing that out line by line. And so the game is to make sure that with each one of those, you’ve done them the service of really listening and really trying to inhabit the world through their point of view. What are the years you’re writing this book. What are the years. What are you writing. Kind of the last three. The last three. So the last three years, I think specifically, have been a fight over what we should think about quote unquote, great men of history. What should you think about. And this goes back before the last few years, but the last decade, let’s call it, which is certainly, I think, in your head, what should you think about the founding fathers of this country. What should you think about somebody with a personality of Donald Trump. Clearly a man who is bent the river of history himself, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. I was just at the Frick gallery I mean, what a beautiful gallery. And then you read a little bit about Henry Frick and there’s a lot of it’s built on some blood Yeah, that incredible museum, and there’s both the critique of them. And then also in the period in which you’re writing, specifically the backlash to that critique, the backlash to the idea that we have swept away the need for these conquerors, these human beings who are engines of a certain kind of progress. And you may not. What that progress requires, but that is how we have America. That is how one day go to Mars. That is how we got to the moon, that it’s not all nice and but there has been, I think, a cultural five years ago