An ageing writer, a stoner dropout and an Om-chanting parrot pass lockdown together in a swanky condo near Madison Square Park in Manhattan. So runs the central scenario of The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, set in early 2020. During the pandemic, she writes, “we were all living with the sense that, at any moment, some inexplicable new story would unfold.” By focusing on this unlikely trio, Nunez tries to circumvent the problem of portraying what the psychologist Adam Grant has dubbed the “boring apocalypse”.
Our unnamed narrator — a novelist and academic who usually lives alone and appears to be, like Nunez, in her early seventies — is in a high-risk category for Covid. Her “chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures” during that “uncertain spring” (a phrase borrowed knowingly from Virginia Woolf) is observing the ephemeral blossoming of flowers — magnolias, cherry blossoms, daffodils, narcissi and tulips — in early-morning walks.
“You’re a vulnerable,” a friend scolds her for breaking the rules with these strolls. “And you need to act like one.” Yet it emerges that her new flatmates are also vulnerable in their own way. “Vetch” — the nickname she gives the young man — has previously been hospitalised with mental-health issues. Bred in captivity, Eureka, the mini-macaw, is likely an endangered species.
The narrator had agreed to bird-sit for a friend of a friend who is stuck in California, in turn lending her apartment to a doctor on the front line. She enjoys playing with Eureka, whose domesticated environment seems a metaphor for lockdown. He “had a slew of toys designed for activities parrots do in the wild — foraging, climbing, chewing, shredding”. Although a breed known for mimicking speech, the bird is “not much of a talker”.
But this companionable duo is disrupted when Vetch, Eureka’s previous bird-sitter, returns to live here unannounced, having been kicked out of his parents’ home. While the narrator initially bristles at the intrusion (“A misanthrope. A mansplainer. Possibly a budding ecoterrorist”), an unlikely friendship emerges. The two bond over joints, existential conversations and vegan ice cream.
Animals make us realise the fragility of life, the narrator reflects. Having characterised Virginia Woolf’s pet marmoset in Mitz (1998), a grieving Great Dane in the 2018 National Book Award–winning The Friend and a rescue cat in What Are You Going Through (2020), Nunez also sees the unconditional love seemingly offered by pets as an antidote to vulnerability. They “are like children who never grow up, who never become sullen teenagers or distant adults to be seen only on holidays,” she once told Vanity Fair. In the new novel, the narrator counts “not having had more animals in [her] life among [her] biggest regrets”.
Other recurring preoccupations include ageing, grief, gender dynamics and the function of fiction as the world goes to hell in a handcart. Echoing sentiments expressed in Nunez’s recent works, “the traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time,” the narrator reflects; “fictional story-telling is coming across as beside the point”. What’s called for instead, she suggests, is “a literature of personal history and reflection.”
Although the events in Nunez’s recent fiction are not autobiographical, the consciousness and musings are very much hers. The first-person voice of The Vulnerables is reminiscent of the one that narrates The Friend and What Are You Going Through, both of which resemble older iterations of the narrator of her semi-autobiographical 1995 debut A Feather on the Breath of God.
In an unconscious bracketing, that book ends with the narrator trying to explain her motivations for a love affair to an older woman who’s described as “homely”: “How can she possibly understand?” the character wonders. “This woman has never been ravished.” In The Vulnerables, a friend suspects the narrator is so annoyed by the dishy Vetch because she would be sleeping with him if she were younger.
While this loose trilogy invariably invokes comparisons to Rachel Cusk’s Outline novels, Nunez’s narrator is less of a cipher than Cusk’s — particularly in The Vulnerables, in which the point of view stays strictly with her, bucking the invisibility that society attempts to impose on older women. It emerges that the reason she refers to Vetch as “Vetch” (after a weed) is because he had trouble remembering her name.
Having already imagined a global pandemic in her dystopian, near-future novel Salvation City (2010), in which a teenaged protagonist is orphaned by a deadly flu, Nunez does not catastrophise Covid. Instead, the rhythms of lockdown serve as a backdrop while her narrator laments the state of the world — including class and racial inequity, climate change, Trump, phone addiction, literary cancel culture and the demonisation of men in contemporary fiction.
I would read a grocery list by Sigrid Nunez. But The Vulnerables is more grocery listy than most of her work. Like many novels written during or just after the pandemic, it feels fragmented — a product of the scattered lockdown brain. “I had lost the ability to concentrate,” the narrator admits. “It was only the news that gripped my attention, the one thing I wished I could ignore.”
It may well be the case that, as a character in What Are You Going Through says, “if every poet in the world sat down today and wrote a poem about climate change, it wouldn’t save one tree.” But a novelist fretting over the futility of novels in a novel? That seems a little, well, futile.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez Virago £16.99/Riverhead Books $28, 256 pages
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