Weekend Listen: George Saunders Imagines an Oil Exec’s Deathbed

0:00Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London with the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.

0:37So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens. It's smart, calm and to the point. And it fits into your morning. You can find new episodes of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. On Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatra. This week, an oil CEO in the bardo.

1:18A decade ago, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh gave a series of lectures titled The Great Derangement, where he argued that contemporary fiction in all forms has been ignoring the climate crisis. and that was adding to the peril humans already faced. Many have heeded his call since, in the form of books, movies, plays, even oratorio. So this year on Zero, we are running a series called Imagine to delve into what some of our most creative minds can do to help us better understand our predicament. My guest today is George Saunders, one of America's best storytellers. You may know him for his 2017 novel, Lincoln and the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize.

2:03This week, George has a new novel out, titled Vigil. In a nutshell, we find ourselves at the bedside of somebody who I imagine to be kind of a 1998 to 2000 era oil executive, the last night of his life, the last hours of his life. We're joined by a woman, the ghost of a woman who died in 1976. So somewhat, I guess, like in A Christmas Carol, she's there to help him. But then it kind of goes, it goes a little sideways from there. I wanted to bring George on the show to ask him how he approached writing this book and what his exploration of climate change revealed. The first half of my interview focuses largely on visual.

2:44And in the second half, we broaden the conversation, hearing George's takes on AI, why literature matters, and even get to talk about games to get writing as a beginner. This conversation was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Send your suggestions and book reviews on zeropod at bloomberg.net. And sorry about this voice, I have a little bit of a cold.

3:11George, welcome to Zero. It's very nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Fiction opens up a vast expanse of subjects that a writer can touch on throughout your career. You know, you've touched on things like theme parks and the afterlife. But in Vigil, you put climate at the heart of the conversation. Why climate change and why now? Well, honestly, I was starting this book back when Biden was still president and when it looked like some strides were being made, maybe in the direction of at least acknowledging the reality of climate change. Little did I know where we were headed. But at that time, I thought, well, it's kind of the most important thing for the world and in the world.

3:55So I'll try to put climate on the table. I don't think I, you know, the idea of climate change novel seems a little bit daunting. So I think sometimes you put a topic on the table and you don't really know what the novel will be about or what it will end up being. But if you put significant things on the table, at least the book won't be trivial. So my thought was, what would it be like? Some of these people who were working so hard to deny climate change, now they're getting old. If one of those guys was dying and he looked back at his life's work, would there be a shred of honesty about what he had done?

4:32Or, you know, is he still feel like he's in the right place? Which then raises the question of how much does a person like that know? When do they know it? So it opened out into all kinds of questions that are probably, I think, relevant for anybody who's lived a life and expended their energy. And at the end, you get to look back and go, how did I do? So it seemed like an intriguing challenge at any rate. And at this stage of my career, I just want a challenge that's going to be some fun. One of the funnest part of writing is to do the research, to try and find out more about the world as you describe it to the reader.

5:07While working on visual, what kind of research did you end up doing? I did some, I would say, medium intense research at the beginning. And what I tend to do is I do a deep dive and I read nothing but that topic for quite a while. I compile it all in a folder and then I put the folder away and never look at it again. Because as a fiction writer, one of the big problems is you could become sort of attached to your research to the extent that the book just becomes a book report about your research that nobody wants. So my thought is, And this was true in my previous novel, Lincoln and the Bardo.

5:40I thought, just get as well-informed as a pretty well-informed amateur so that when you invent, you're not inventing totally divorced from reality. You know, so there was probably two or three months of intense reading and then just, OK, you know something and now you can go ahead and make up some crazy stuff. There's also the fact that your father, I understand, worked for a coal company, that you yourself are an engineer. You studied at the Colorado School of Mines and that for a period you worked in Sumatra in Indonesia on an oil exploration crew. How did that experience shape any of this that's come in the novel?

6:20It gave me a sense that I could write this character. In other words, if I had chosen, you know, given my background, a very wealthy politician, I don't really know where to start with somebody like that. I don't have a way in. But with the oil business, especially the stuff that I did, it made me have a little taste as a young man of what it would be like to be part of that group. to have adventures. I worked in Sumatra and we had some really, you know, for a 22 year old, great adventures in the jungle and tigers and, you know, all kinds of the things that you, that would seem appealing to a young person.

6:56And I also got a taste of that feeling of kind of being, you know, even then in the eighties, part of an embattled, but noble crew of technocrats, you know, that, that we were doing something that was keeping the world turning and no one appreciated it, you know. So I, and I also worked in the Texas oil fields quite a bit. So I knew that some of the, some of the technical stuff, some of the jargon, but mostly the mindset, you know. So again, that it, for me, the way in is always, I use the word fun. I don't know if it's really fun, but the idea that of overflow, like I could, I knew I could write about oil from that perspective with some overflow, given the people I'd known and the things I'd done.

7:36And do you have to speak to, especially for your main characters, the type of person who you're going to represent? So did you end up speaking to an oil executive, for example? No, for me, it's more, I really trust my internal person generator. It's funny, the working assumption is that we contain everybody. So even though I'm a progressive, you know, kind of new age college professor, I used to be a different person. And not only that, a lot of different people that I never actually was do exist within me. So one of the great thrills of being a fiction writer is you can say, okay, could I be a giggly 15-year-old girl in Montreal?

8:17I'm like, yeah, I could do that. You know, I could try. I could sort of imitate her. So for me to interview people is not, again, it sort of pins you down a little bit. You know, if someone says something, you feel, okay, I have to be true to that. But the game of the novelist, as I understand it, is much more kind of fanciful. It's almost like the Shakespearean jester. You know, you're just trying to make some sparks, make some laughs by any means necessary. So for me, that means just giving myself license to invent. And at the same time, trying to have a generosity of spirit and a precision so that I'm being specific about what I'm saying.

8:56And then I think, well, yeah, I can, you know, I can imagine being anyone. You as a reader are also part of this experiment that you're saying, oh, George is playing a game. He's pretending to be an 85-year-old oil executive with different political views than he holds. Okay, I can play that game as well since I'm also large enough and I contain all these multitudes of personality. So I think it's a little bit playful. Both reader and writer sign up for this kind of parlor game in a certain way and then the fun comes from there. And this is true of many of your pieces of work where the story is fantastic.

9:28There are these funny moments. And then at the end, you also realize, oh, my God, that was a dark story that I just read. So you touch on these themes in a very interesting way. But going back to this idea that you said, you know, a climate change novel feels like a hard thing. This is something that others have expressed. So a decade ago, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh gave a series of lectures he called The Great Derangement, where he argued that contemporary literature and contemporary writers had really ignored the climate crisis. And that ignorance is adding to the peril that humans face.

10:06Do you think in that 10 years since, and especially now that you were doing this research, that the literary world has improved in bringing climate change more into the conversation? I think so. And I think there's more of an intention to do so. But for me, the question is, how does one do that, given the features of the form itself? So in other words, if I'm a writer of string quartets, and someone says, oh, your string quartets are ignorant of climate change, think, well, the form has requirements and the form has certain ways of producing delight. And we ignore those at our peril. So again, to me, I think the idea is to – with this book, I think I started thinking, all right, I'm going to prove to all the skeptics that climate change is real.

10:53And then as you get into the research, you're like, that isn't, one, that's not what a novel does. But two, anyone who looks into it is already convinced. So that's not it. Instead, I'm going to use it as a backdrop or kind of a feature in the same way that, you know, if you look at a novel like Schindler's List or the movie, people always say, oh, it's about the Holocaust. But actually, it's not. It's set. It's, you know, it's immersed in the Holocaust, but it's about something much more specific. and human and universal, which is, for example, how does one within an evil system, how does one strive to do good?

11:30So anytime we start writing a novel, we find out that the thing we thought it was about, it's not about that. And what I found is if you write a novel or a story and it ends up being about what you thought it was going to be about, you probably failed because the reader feels that condescension. You know, okay, he's giving me a lecture. He's still giving me a lecture. The lecture is finished. I wish I'd read a different book. But on the other hand, if we enter into it as teammates, let's try to stumble on some mystery. Let's open some questions up. That I think is more the valid function of the novel.

12:04The book that might need to be written about climate change might not have climate change in it at all. It might be about denial mindset. It might be about corporate hegemony, or it might be three people on an island somewhere. So we don't know. Yeah, it is interesting. I noted that there were only three mentions of the word climate in the entire book. And one of them is not about climate change at all. So it is a very interesting way in which you touch on the subject without being so literal in many cases. So crises in general do make for interesting storytelling moments. Like we have great novels that feature volcanoes and tsunamis and earthquakes.

12:51There are great novels about financial crises and terrorist attacks. War, of course, features in many, many great novels. Is there something about the disaster that is climate change that makes it difficult? Maybe, and I'm just thinking this for the first time, but it might just be that it's in some ways gradual, on the human scale it's gradual, and it's also disseminated so widely in so many different places. So I think that's difficult to come up with a narrative stance that could describe that naturally. I think Richard Powers did a really great job in the overstory. But, you know, to say a crisis that's happening quite quickly, of course, in geologic time, but in human time, it can appear gradual.

13:40It's not happening everywhere all the time. It's a little bit difficult. But again, for me, I would never, even early in this book, I thought, okay, it's not a climate change novel. It's a novel about the end of life. And, you know, and then because, you know, one of the things that will really block a writer up is pressure. You know, I must do this. I must communicate this. That's not a formula for fun. You know, if you went on a date, you know, I must make her love me. That's a very bad vibe, you know. So I think for writing a novel, a certain amount of relaxation. And also, you know, you really are, no matter how dark the topic, you really are trying to make some love, you know, make some positive energy for the reader.

14:25And I think the end game of a novel is somehow to make both parties, reader and writer, feel a little bit more alert to the fact that they're still alive. So that is in a certain way, if you think of writers like Gogol or Flannery O 'Connor, that's something that happens regardless of topic or regardless of darkness. In the same way that a really well, beautifully done horror movie can kind of make you feel alive. That's the game. So the other theme that I want to explore here is about guilt and regret, which feature in the book in interesting ways. And they don't have to be about climate related.

15:04They're just sort of at the end of your life. What do you feel regret for? What are you guilty about? It's something that all of us have thoughts about and not just at the end of your life, sometimes as you go through life. In trying to address the guilt, is there something that you hope to get out of it? You know, say an oil executive reads Vigil, which I am sure they will. You know, what do you hope they might learn from it? That's another question I feel I have to, as a writer, I have to really be careful of that. Because it puts me in an innately sort of condescending position for me to teach you something.

15:46I am not sure that I have much to teach, but I do feel I can put an oil executive or anybody through a certain experience. So in that way, I think of myself more as a roller coaster designer. You know, I don't have to know your profession to make you gasp at the bottom of a steep hill. And then embedded in that is the idea that that's a fun, it's a, I suppose it's a positive experience to go through. And I think mostly what happens when I read fiction that's good, all my certainties get wobbly. You know, I'm made aware of how quickly I normally rush to judgment and from what a limited place, you know.

16:27It's a fairly small aspiration. But, you know, to say to somebody, come on this journey with me. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you've done. But at the end of it, we're both going to feel a little something, a little more, I'd say a little more open. but you can say it however you like. That really is it. I mean, if we think about a songwriter, what does a songwriter try to do? It tries to remind you you're alive for a couple of minutes, you know? So, you know, I don't really have a sort of a tautological or a rather educational intent, really. I don't. Because if I do that, I'd become a, you know, a pedant.

17:04Yeah. I mean, a great novel is also giving you an experience of being somebody else, It's putting yourself as a reader in somebody else's shoes for that period of time to really acknowledge the reality of another being. And that can be very powerful, regardless of the type of person you're empathizing with or what cause you're empathizing with them for. And in this case, it's an oil executive. You know, it's very clear some of the dialogues are very direct, calling out the horrors that may have happened as a result of his direct actions. But the reader is empathizing with the characters. Is there a limit to that empathy, you know?

17:49Because people can do horrible things and those horrible things are very real. But is there a limit to that? Well, that's where I get in a bit of a tangle because the words empathy, compassion, sympathy, those are sometimes confusing. I think there's not a limit to the interest we can feel in another human being, even the most terrible. And I think it's all positive phenomenon just to be more interested in somebody and therefore to understand them better. The tricky part is that sometimes I I think in the West, we confuse that activity with permission giving somehow or a kind of a pre-forgiveness.

18:32So if I empathize with somebody, it doesn't matter what they do to me. I think that's a misunderstanding of compassion, for example. So to me, I have no problem trying to imagine even the inner process of even the worst person in the world. The difficulty, I think, is it's almost like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. when you narrate somebody from inside, you warm them up. You can't help it. You have somebody in the SS and you narrate a childhood memory, they suddenly are warming up. And that's a really complicated question. It's one of the reasons that, I mean, this guy in the book is bad, but he's bad in that sort of 2000 George Bush kind of way.

19:20He hasn't rejected a rules-based order. He gives lip service to enlightenment values and so on. So he's kind of a thing compared to some of the stuff that's going on now, he's kind of a lightweight, but that I feel I can do him. Could I do somebody worse? Would I want to? That's a really interesting question. And honestly, I don't know until I try, but it would be interesting for me. I have the idea of trying to write something about the current administration. And then you get into some tricky stuff. What does the mental phenomenon of a megalomaniac look like? Can you do it? Is it interesting to read at all?

19:56You know, so important questions. Yeah. It's a difficult one as a journalist too. I mean, And, you know, I've had all executives on the podcast before. And there is this immediate judgment that comes from a lot of the green climate crowd saying, you should never platform these people. You shouldn't give them a voice. They already have a platform of their own. And we've got into this sort of territory, especially with the conversation on the Internet, where people don't want to hear the other side. and a novel of yours kind like breaks through and enables people to look at the other side. Are there other ways in which we could do this, not just a novel?

20:39Well, I think the conversations that you're describing would be really interesting. But as someone who does these conversations, the trick is to get somebody off their shtick. So if an oil executive comes in and he's just going to resist you, then I don't know. I mean, for me, the question that's in my mind right now is, okay, I'm a naturally conflict-averse person. That's why I'm a writer. And I love to think the best of people. And I love to pretend I can inhabit anybody's mind. But your earlier question really haunts me. Are there people, one, that you couldn't inhabit and two, that you shouldn't?

21:21And that's interesting. But I think to me, okay, I think that understanding another person's point of view is always a superpower. Even if your intent is to resist them, it's a great tool. You know, if you were in a football game or something and someone said, hey, would you like the chance to inhabit the mind of the opposing coach for five seconds? You'd be crazy not to take that chance, you know. So to me, it's kind of a win-win to try to empathize or sympathize with other people as long as we don't slide over into enabling. And, you know, like for example, now here in the US, the press is really doing, in my opinion, a pretty poor job of dealing with these hegemons that are taking over.

22:06There's a lot of enacting of older models of journalism, which is, well, you know, we've got to show both sides. So, but it sometimes becomes, you know, this side says hippos can fly. This side says they can't. Okay, we'll meet in the middle. They fly sometimes, you know. So there's a kind of institutional sternness that we're struggling with, I think, to call it a spade a spade and describe these things that are being done. But it's difficult in the old model of journalistic fairness. Does that seem true? Yeah, it is definitely a challenge because as soon as you are firm about something, somebody will say that's a biased point of view and it's a tricky balance to play out.

22:49But maybe one other thing that I've, you know, in preparation to talk to you, I read a bunch of your work, but I also listened to you talk and give interviews. And I've interviewed hundreds of people in my life. And there is a type of person who says, I don't know often. And that typically is a writer. And I've heard you say, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know. I am sure about that particular point of view. That uncertainty of not knowing is not comfortable for most people. And that's why we get so much judgment online. is there a way in which you can make somebody be comfortable with that uncertainty without having to be what you and I are which is writing which is a writer which is what our profession is I'm going to answer this question kind of backwards maybe but it occurs to me that one of the reasons people have become uncomfortable with uncertainty is that there's so much space for opining you know we have the internet and it seems to be saying hey what do you think even if you don't know anything?

23:53What do you think? And so there's a kind of an implied pressure that we never don't know. For me, as a lifelong anxious person, and when I started doing interviews, I found that it was so much easier just to say, I have no idea, than to falsify an answer that later I would regret. So for me, it's kind of an anxiety reducing move. But I think for most people these days, it's a sign of weakness to not have an opinion, which actually some of the most powerful people I have ever known were quite, you know, reserved. And they, they recognize that, you know, an opinion costs you to have an opinion costs you because it nails you down at a certain point in a world that is always changing and always uncertain.

24:41So a person who can resist a facile opinion stays open 360 degrees and they also receive more more data that's a very i think a very powerful thing for someone to recognize that their integrity and ultimately their ability to act when needed are all improved by a certain sort of reserved quality so so i tried to make it a point not to express an opinion well when i don't know anything that's a good one but also when the opinion isn't needed. The abstract opinion is a hallmark of contemporary life. What do you think about those idiots who climb Mount Everest? First of all, I don't know. And second of all, is the world really waiting for me to opine?

25:25Yeah, I don't think so. And I found it really comforting to go, you don't have to know everything. You don't have to know almost anything. And if you factor in time, like at what time do I need to know that thing about Mount Everest? the answer is probably never. So much of the opining we do online is speculative and abstract and I think it also costs us something.

25:52After the break, I asked George what he thinks about AI and whether it complements or compromises human creativity. What do you think? Write to the show at zeropod at bloomberg.net and while you're at it, write us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. It helps new listeners find the show.

26:23You know, you've been writing at a time and you found success at a time where the written word in general is in perhaps the most fierce competition that it has been in against other type of media. It's not cinema or Netflix streaming these days. It's TikTok and Instagram and Reels. Do you think that the written word is losing to audio and video? And if it is, then what are we losing as a result? I think it kind of depends how you define losing. I figured out a long time ago that if you have a handful of dedicated readers who really know how to read, that's a kind of a super dense pod of potential influence.