How to Love a Monster

George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love. But in a different way, Vigil opens up entirely new ground, by asking what it means to view the world’s depravities not just as wrongs to be made right, but as wounds to be healed.

For much of his career, class and the economy have been his primary framework for working out this question. Whether in his famed story “The Semplica-Girls Diaries,” in which migrants make a living as front-yard ornaments, or in “Escape from Spiderhead,” in which experiment subjects are made to work off their debt in pleasure research centers, we have seen how the systems we’ve set up can destroy us in sometimes comic ways.

But telling a story about the horrors of the world that doesn’t careen into despair is no small trick. A story about migrants who sell themselves as animatronics for the wealthy could easily be told as a threadbare morality play. It would be easy to take the story of political autocracy, as with his recent “Love Letter,” and to tell it remorselessly. But such stories would also be incredibly boring, and arguably less true. For intertwined throughout these stories of rapacious capitalism, is an undercurrent of empathy. To return to “Semplica-Girls,” the protagonist of the story is a middle-class man trapped in the rat race, who hires the Semplica-Girls for a party to elevate his social status. It would be easy to merely condemn the lawn ornaments’ exploitation at the hands of a status-conscious consumer. But Saunders juxtaposes the girls’ suffering with the love the protagonist has for his children, and his sincere desire to help them be respected in the world. Even dictators have mothers, and even monsters want to have a friend.

But such sentiments, while absolutely true, feel not only wrong but gauche in an age of ICE raids and government malice towards its citizens. It doesn’t square with our desire for justice, much less