Thoughts shared in lockdown isolation

Meandering journey taken is one to savour

The Vulnerables

By Sigrid Nunez (Little Brown, $37.99)

Reviewed by Louise Ward

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W.. .. hen did “vulnerable” become a noun? This novel deals with the experience of an older woman during the Covid-19 lockdown period in New York. Having given up her apartment to a doctor (also a “vulnerable”), she is recruited to housesit a parrot by the name of Eureka, an animal with his own room in a luxurious abode.

There is no linear narrative to this novel — it’s rather a series of thoughts and experiences told as the writer feels them. The character muses on writing and reading, the intricate truths of human behaviour, the unexpected deliciousness of oat milk icecream. It reads like an essay, a long-form non-fiction piece, and once the reader has settled into its voice, the read is smooth and entertaining.

The nature of the pandemic and the shared lockdown journey are explored — the inability to concentrate, the experience of reading, the feelings stories bring out in us. Being alone, being lonely, the protagonist’s morning walks starting earlier and lasting longer.

We wander with her, have strange interactions in the park, follow her thought processes as she imagines the home of a woman she observes where she might sit and look out of the window like “a figure in an Edward Hopper painting”.

What Nunez calls “wrong thinking” is discussed — how “catastrophising”, the process of a person’s thoughts following something to its worst conclusion, is a thing that can be worked through and rationalised until the world’s systems fail and the catastrophe becomes real. The question is raised: “What use is this diagnosis anymore?”

The Vulnerables is a meandering, sharply written joy — a book to relate to, to savour and to chuckle over, wryly.