In the span of one year, I have now read three Sigrid Nunez novels, the most I have read by a single author in that time frame. It is the first time in a long time an author has excited me this much. Throughout my reading of this novel, I kept thinking to myself: what a woman, what a voice, what an immaculate authorial eye.
The Vulnerables, published in 2023, is Nunez’s most recent release and maybe the first true pandemic novel I’ve read. It is an insight— through one woman’s eye—into the most notable time in recent history that was collectively felt by every single living person. Our narrator is an unnamed woman whose life is reminiscent of all of our lives then—how we all felt, the things we did, the news of the virus a catalyst for worldwide depression.
“It was an uncertain spring. Early each morning I went for a walk.”
The novel opens at a point when the world has gone past the critical stages of the pandemic. Our narrator is describing to us what the time felt like for her, telling us about the simple tasks she indulged in to fill her days—the walks to the park, the books she read. In its near entirety, The Vulnerables is a woman reflecting. Combing back through her memories and, in turn, showing us our lives in those days. Through Nunez’s ever sharp, observative writing, we are indeed able to see ourselves in the narrator. While many of our experiences might have been different, a collective feeling of the times and its impact is what she manages to capture perfectly: all of humanity uncertain about the state of everything, clinging to anything to keep ourselves sane. And she captures the fear most of all—the general fear, the sense of dread heightened. The thought of death and dying at any time, ever-increasing, day by day. At one point, a friend of the narrator addresses her habit of going out, regarding her as a vulnerable. “You’re a vulnerable, she said. And you need to act like one.”
One would generally expect that if such a time was to be put into writing, it’d span hundreds of pages in order to graze the surface of what life felt like then, as we’ve seen from other pandemic novels. However, Nunez achieves this in a little over two hundred and fifty pages, and it highlights what I consider her greatest ability: depicting the human experience. Using her signature vignette style, she hits every beat in trying to show us ourselves. The narrator, a writer, is unable to read or write at many points during the pandemic, and by it, we recognize how the period sucked interest out of various passions for many people—the times heavily characterized by the loss of lives and loss of interest in life.
“All those shared stories of some creature or other seeing a human through, instilling this one with hope, saving that one’s sanity.”
A primary theme we see throughout the novel is the idea of latching on to things to keep one’s sanity. Early into the pandemic, the narrator gets asked by a friend’s friend to aid in taking care of her pet parrot which she has unfortunately been separated from due to the pandemic. The narrator agrees to the task, and eventually decides to move into the apartment with the parrot indefinitely. What blooms is an attachment to the parrot, Eureka, which becomes more like a friend and companion to the narrator. This sort of story—a friendship between a human and an animal— is not unusual to Nunez, being the foundation for her 2020 novel, The Friend. But while it does not feel entirely fresh here, it does not feel repetitive either. Here, it’s more of a little sub-plot in the overall general plot. Nunez depicts the importance of such bonds as vital for mental stability, and furthers this sentiment by referencing documentary filmmaker and naturalist, Craig Foster, and quotes him talking about his friendship with an Octopus, saying, “You start to care about all the animals, even the tiniest ones, you understand how highly vulnerable these animals’ lives are, how vulnerable all lives are. You start to think about your own vulnerability and about death, your own death.”
While we get the singular view of the effects of the pandemic on an individual, Nunez further gives us insight into what it felt like for people who quarantined someone else or a group of people. Sometime before the pandemic heightens, the narrator receives an unexpected visit from the former caretaker of the parrot, Vetch—the son of a wealthy family who is friends with the owners of the parrot. The cohabitation initially does not sit well with the narrator; there is constant tension in the air between them, there is a fear of intrusion into her newly formed friendship with the Euereka. There is a necessary delusion, which Nunez wonderfully captures, the mental state of many people at the time—our flippant, often irrational behaviors. Once after an argument with Vetch, the narrator wonders, “Why did he become so angry over such a small thing? Why did I feel so hurt over such a small thing? Maybe being one of those people who had to go to work every day while others stayed safe at home was getting to him.” In a bid to give herself an answer, she concludes, “There’s no understanding people’s behavior these days. Don’t even try.”
“Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read.”
One of the many treats of Nunez’s works is that she always manages to look at everything and capture the multiple facets to life and living, to being a person in the world, whether it’s her narrators telling us about an interaction or recalling a time in their lives. And one of the most present things we see in this novel is that there is a lot of recollection and memory, from the central idea of the novel to the little things. The state of the world before such a tumultuous time, our narrator’s life before such a time, our narrator’s life before the present. In one of the most poignant writing moments in the novel, our narrator recalls high school, the little moments, then the bitter moments. “I remember the end of childhood. It was June,” she tells us. Perhaps, one of the most affecting sentences I have ever read.
The best thing I’ve come to expect from every Nunez novel is the literary references. Having read two of her works before this, I knew it was sure to be here as well, and it was, and as always, no one does it like her. Through the films, the books, the authors, everything the narrator references, we get a look into her life and how she sees the world. I’ve never seen anyone do this style the way Nunez does it. Her insert of these references, rather than being for show, broadens the eye of the reader. It is impossible to deny that her eye is in her art, and seeing the world as she does, we learn empathy for ourselves in many ways.
While this can be classified primarily as a pandemic novel, it is also a novel about literature and how it explains the world, as with every other Nunez work I’ve read. All three novels have been about writers, but this might be the one with the most discussion about the craft as art and profession. There are points where it begins to feel like a departure from the core story and a segue into the aspects on writing, but it’s impossible to be mad at it. Nunez offers our narrator to us as a woman so in love with her passion and the arts, and how it’s woven into every fiber of her being. And again, it can be said that all three Nunez narrators I have encountered are too alike, but what she excels at is making each of them distinct and one as interesting as the other. It never feels repetitive, even when they quote the same authors, from Woolf to Coetzee to Weil, and so on. There is a commitment to this aspect of her writing that we see in every work, which she in turn tries to sell us, and I love her more with each novel for it. It’s her favorite device, but she has not worn it out yet. We are able to tell the vitality and importance of the craft to the writer in this novel more than ever, because while the commitment is present in the other works, it is heightened here as there is a major interlude in the novel dedicated to the thoughts of authors on writing. But still, an argument can be made for such deviations being too much, hence causing a lack of focus in the grand scheme of the central telling, and it’ll be a valid one.
In The Vulnerables, Nunez compounds a gruesome time in our recent history and helps us see and remember the fragility of our humanity. It is one of the best works about the pandemic released so far, and Nunez cements herself as one of the greatest living writers working today, and a personal favorite of mine.
