Meeting #8 - Wednesday, March 18, 2026

"Elevation flared within me.

My charge had been born him. But had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects, including but not limited to: the powerful nature of his early desires, which had led him to strive, which, in turn, led him to accomplish, and in accomplishing, he had brought about harm, even as the mind he'd been given, from the start, bloomed forth, just as it must, causing him, in the face of that harm (and the accusations made against him due to that harm), to supress and deny the reality of the harm and become, over time averse to even acknowledging it."

It had unscrolled just as it must.

It did not seem strange to me, but inevitable."

The Wild Gentleman Book Club

Last month, we convened to discuss Dan Quinn's Ishmael.

We had a fascinating conversation, digging into familiar ideas on legacy and how we can make a positive impact in the world. As usual, we discussed books and authors we love, and came back to George Saunders, whose book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain was our discussion book for November 2025. Saunders has been making the podcast rounds, and we all said we wanted to read his latest book, Vigil.

And so, we picked George Saunders's Vigil as the book club selection for March. Tonight we meet to discuss the book, which is similar to both George Saunders's best-known book, Lincoln in the Bardo, and The Wild Gentleman's book club read for December, A Christmas Carol.

As TWG Book Club regular Mike Troiano explains in his recent blog post on Vigil, "The Scoreboard is a Lie,":

"The book is being compared to A Christmas Carol, and it’s not hard to see why. But where Dickens’ Scrooge is redeemed by his ghosts, Boone is something harder to resolve — a man so sealed inside his own self-regard that the question of redemption barely registers. He has spent a lifetime building walls against doubt, and he’s built them well."

Vigil Meeting Details

We are meeting tonight, Wednesday, March 18, 2026, at 6:00 PM, at Paddy's Public House in West Newton.

George Saunders's recent book, Vigil , is a short and can be read in a day or two; it's also a good listen on Audible or Spotify. Even if you didn't read it, come to Paddy's, join our growing community, and have a good conversation.

Please join us. You can find more information and RSVP here: The Wild Gentleman Book Club - Meeting #8.

You can also get a printable version of this reading guide here: Printable Reading Guide.

How Vigil Can Guide Men in 2026?

George Saunders sets Vigil over the course of a single night as a wealthy and powerful oil tycoon, K.J. Boone, lies nearly comatose in bed, nearing death. Characters, alive and dead, appear in and out of the scene, some to support, others to decry the man's world-burning legacy. Jill "Doll" Blaine, a woman who died decades prior, guides souls in their final hours, charged specifically with comforting the dying as they cross from the physical world to the spiritual. That is her task for Boone, who proves a bit of a challenge due to his enormous pride and his immense consequence. Although he is pushed to atone for deliberately misleading the world about the impact of humans, and in particular of oil, on the environment, as far as he's concerned, he's not to be held accountable for any of it.

The great task we need to wrestle with in reading Vigil surrounds the impact of our entire lives. Even though the damage Boone helped cause becomes undeniable, he is presented as someone who achieved incredible success on his own terms, coming from humble beginnings, providing for his family, and seemingly being widely admired by friends.

Is he sorry? Does someone who bent the world to his will and called it success need to repent?

Like much of his writing, Saunders uses boundary spaces (here between life and death, truth and belief) to prod topics that might be too heady to engage with because we are so concerned with living, so busy, or too afraid to dig into. This short book doesn't seem like a "hard book," but because of Saunders's economy with language, it challenges readers emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively.

We are left to ponder the implications of our love, of our passion projects, and of our striving for achievement. Can you be a good man and, yet, leave the world worse than you found it?

Discussion Guide

Key Themes to Consider

1. Legacy and Accountability

K.J. Boone built an empire and, by his own measure, succeeded brilliantly. Even faced with evidence that his approach was unethical and, therefore, requires contrition, he remains a man who does not doubt himself. Visitors arrive at his deathbed — from this world and beyond — to force a reckoning he has spent a lifetime avoiding. Vigil asks whether a man can truly know the worth of his life while he is still inside it, and what it means to be held accountable for consequences he never intended — or chose despite knowing full well the tradeoffs.

For many of us at midlife, the question of legacy is no longer abstract. We are building something — careers, families, businesses, communities — and the question of what we are leaving behind is ever present.

Questions to explore:

• How do you currently think about your legacy? Has that changed or evolved as you've gotten older?
• Boone refuses to accept responsibility for consequences he didn't personally intend. Where is the line between intention and accountability?
• What would it mean, honestly, to take stock of the life you've built so far?
• Is Saunders too hard on Boone — or not hard enough?

2. Compassion for the Undeserving

Jill "Doll" Blaine's job is to comfort the dying — all of them, regardless of what they've done. With Boone, that task is almost impossibly hard. And yet Saunders, through Doll, insists on the attempt.

The novel's most radical argument is not about climate change or corporate greed — it's about whether genuine compassion can, or should, extend to people who have caused real harm and feel no remorse.

Questions to explore:

• Is Jill's compassion for Boone admirable, naïve, or something more complicated?
• Do you believe people can genuinely change late in life — or is character largely fixed by a certain age?
• Think of someone in your own life who has negatively impacted you. Is there a version of Jill's question related to her own killer — "at what moment could they have been otherwise?" — that changes how you see them?

3. Power, Ambition, and the Cost of Conquest

Boone is a man who rose to the top of his industry through will, intelligence, and tenacity. He is, in the traditional framework, a successful man. Vigil asks what that framework costs — not just environmentally or socially, but personally. What does a man give up, in himself, when he organizes his life entirely around conquest and dominance?

This connects directly to our ongoing conversation at The Wild Gentleman about the difference between ambition that builds and ambition that consumes. Boone's story is an extreme version of a tendency many of us recognize — the drive to achieve, to win, to leave a mark — taken to its logical and devastating conclusion.

Questions to explore:

• How often do you examine the gap between the man you are and the man you're trying to be?
• Where in your own life has the drive to achieve shaded into something that cost you — or others — more than it was worth?
• Boone dismisses criticism as hypocritical, since we all benefit from the industries he represents. Is he wrong?
• How does the character of "The Frenchman" serve as a juxtaposition to Boone?
• What would genuinely good ambition look like — ambition that builds rather than extracts?

Passages Worth Discussing

On Inevitability:
"Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?"

On Comfort:
"At such moments, I especially cherished my task. I could comfort."

On Generosity:
"Vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds' time, a mile or ten thousand miles."

On Self-Satisfaction:
"He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it?"

Looking Ahead

For April's meeting, we'll be reading something that hopefully matches the arrival of Spring, in what T.S. Eliot called "the cruellest month" — details to be shared soon. We'll continue exploring questions of adventure, responsibility, love, and what it means to be a good man.

Please share any suggestions: dennis@thewildgentleman.com

Final Thoughts

Saunders creates humans who make choices, face consequences, and, still, often must reckon with the deeper meaning of life. In K.J. Boone, he gives us an extreme version of questions that, in smaller ways, we all face about strength, honesty, compassion, providing, and success.

The Wild Gentleman exists to create space for the kind of honest self-examination this book asks. Luckily, the book club also creates a community to support each other through our greatest doubts, worries, and misimpressions about our essential selves.

Tonight, let's dig into deep questions about success as we see it from the end of our lives, reflections that are not easy. The question isn't whether we'll leave a mark. It's whether, at the end, we'll have been honest about what kind.

The Wild Gentleman Book Club
Where thoughtful men gather to explore literature, meaning, and authentic masculinity.

Wild at Heart. Refined in Mind.