BOOK REVIEW Lockdown in the city that never sleeps
It was an uncertain spring. Sigrid Nunez opens her ninth novel — set in the early days of the pandemic — with the first line from Virginia Woolf’s The Years. This is just one of many references to other writers that permeate the novel — Charles Dickens, Edward BulwerLytton, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke and Elizabeth Bishop all make an appearance.
Nunez’s meta-literary references locate her works within a larger literary conversation and link the personal and immediate experiences of her characters to universal themes. It’s part of the rich tapestry she creates, adding layers of meaning and texture, and deepening the emotional and intellectual resonance of her novels.
The Vulnerables begins with the nameless narrator’s struggle to find meaning during the pandemic, as she spends hours wandering through eerily deserted New York streets and parks, unable to concentrate on anything except the news.
“Early each morning I went for a walk. It was my chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures, observing day by day the arrival of a new season ... I enjoyed watching the dogs play, too, before the dog runs were closed. Weren’t we all reduced to the state of children now. These were the rules: break them and you’ll be punished, your happy-making privileges taken away. For the good of all: understood. But the dogs — what had they done?”
The novel extends the themes of her earlier works, like National Book Award winner The Friend (2018) — where an aspiring writer inherits a Great
Dane from her deceased friend, and What Are You Going Through (2020), in which a writer in late middle age has to deal with the impending suicide of a dying friend. Loss, the complexities of human relationships, introspection and the human-animal bond are common subjects in Nunez’s writing.
Later she observes that a young friend disapproves of her spending so much time outdoors: “You’re allowed to get a breath of air, she said. But that doesn’t mean wandering about the streets for hours. But why put it like that, wandering about, as if I were some dotty, driftless old lady.”
The narrator, an academic and writer, bears several similarities to Nunez herself. As someone considered at risk during the pandemic, or “a vulnerable”, she agrees to stay in a luxury Manhattan apartment owned by a friend trapped in California to care for Eureka, an intelligent and sociable miniature macaw left behind by a young college student.
Things take an unexpected turn when the original birdsitter, a good-looking Gen Z vegan, reappears, leading to an unusual living arrangement involving the woman, the young man, and the parrot. It soon becomes clear that her new flatmates are also vulnerable in their own way — the young man has mental health issues, and the mini-macaw is most likely an endangered species and “not much of a talker”.
The development of these inadvertent relationships, both human and animal, forms the basis of the story, as Nunez delves into the sustaining power of connection in a world where people are increasingly distant from each other. Small acts of kindness happen in the apartment, while outside, the streets are empty and unfamiliar.
Throughout, she contemplates the role and significance of literature, reflecting on the widespread feeling of being mentally unsettled in the face of an uncertain future: “Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind.”
Recalling the division between essential and nonessential workers, “for writers, the distinction was easy”, Nunez’s narrator writes. “Only journalists are essential... Silence the journalists and we’d have the end of human rights.”
While attending a Zoom discussion on the value of novels in “dark times”, the consensus, she learns, is that the genre has run its course. “More and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, why are you making things up?”
Despite the bleak backdrop of the pandemic, the novel carries a tone of strange, gentle optimism, suggesting that there is still reason to continue. Sharply observant and often amusing, The Vulnerables is spare, surprisingly moving and exquisitely written.