Novel Thoughts: Kindness Vigil

I was walking in Boston on a frigidly cold January night, overheated in my wool coat but with my face somewhere between painfully cold and thankfully numb, and there on the corner of Stuart Street and Trinity Place, was a child’s book, lost or discarded on the sidewalk, splayed open, askew amongst the pebbles of rock salt. BE KIND, the title admonished me.

I had just come from listening to George Saunders in conversation with Paul Tremblay at the Back Bay Event Center hosted by the Harvard Book Store. Saunders has been touring for his new book Vigil (full disclosure: I have not finished it yet). I’d caught his appearance on The Tonight Show and having read his A Swim in a Pond in the Rain with my writing group, I was low-key giddy to see him live. At dinner prior to the event, we discussed the recent review of Vigil by Dwight Garner in the New York Times. I’ll let you read it yourself, but suffice it to say, it was not a kind review. Garner’s main complaint seems to be that Saunders has a moral code, is a Buddhist, and believes that reading fiction can help develop empathy (yes, it can and does)¹. It is unclear to me why that is a Bad Thing^TM.

Saunders himself seems slightly bemused at being the ‟Kindness Guy” after giving a viral commencement speech in 2013 that could be described as a meditation on kindness (heavily laced with Saunders’ characteristic wit) but has also embraced this social media assigned role. I can attest to his kindness firsthand; Saunders sat in the positively arctic theater lobby and signed books and shook hands and kindly tolerated selfies for nearly two hours following his conversation. I felt authentically seen in the short interaction that I had with him and he wished me luck in my future work. He was generous with his time and refreshingly sincere. Garner, on the other hand, seems very put out that morals or kindness have made their way into a work of fiction, that an author had the audacity to offer a judgment of a fictional character and to have found their own creation lacking, imbued with moral turpitude (or as Saunders put it during his conversation, the character is “a real stinker”). According to Garner, fiction fails when it moralizes, when it judges or when it proselytizes anything resembling kindness.

I have to wonder how this can possibly be true. To live in our current world is to be constantly overwhelmed by the lack of kindness, the pervasive heartlessness of our leaders and their supporters. The cruelty is almost always the point of whatever they do. Their frame of reference is a zero-sum game in which they can only be happy if pain and suffering is meted out to their perceived enemies. In this milieu, how can a book that pushes us to question the value of a man that has done irreparable harm to our world, dishonored our environment or been cruel, be a bad idea? Given our current political situation, pushing people to be even a little more kind seems like a very good and necessary thing. I must be crazy.

When I was inside and warm again, I sat down and read BE KIND. It had, after all, been dropped in my path in a way that felt very much like a cosmic hint. It is a simple children’s book with specific examples of things that we can do to be kind to our fellow humans. But, apparently, this kind of messaging is still urgently needed. Please be kind. Pass it on.

The author with George Saunders at the Back Bay Event Center, Boston, January 29, 2026.

Citation:

1-Bal PM, Veltkamp M (2013) How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation. PLoS ONE 8(1): e55341. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055341