At a book event earlier this year, US author Sigrid Nunez laughingly recalled a graduate student of hers who had read all her novels and had one question to ask: Did she make some of that stuff up? It’s the same anecdote repeated by Nunez’s narrator in her latest and characteristically genre-defying book, The Vulnerables. And it is delivered with a knowing wink. “Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful,” she says. “Others, so that they can tell more lies.”
The great pleasure for the reader is that this celebrated writer is a master of both. The Vulnerables isn’t memoir, even though much of it reads like one. It’s the third in a series of novels in which a narrator not unlike Nunez – a writer of a certain age who lives alone in New York – meditates on love, loneliness, loss and, of course, the act of writing.
The first in this recent series was her 2018 bestseller and US National Book Award winner, The Friend, in which the narrator, grieving the suicide of a close friend and mentor, is soothed by her adoption of his equally bereft great dane. In 2020′s What Are You Going Through the (same?) narrator agrees, with understandable trepidation, to support a terminally ill acquaintance who is planning assisted suicide.
The Vulnerables echoes its immediate predecessors in many ways, but for readers new to Nunez’s work – this is her eighth novel – it will just as easily stand alone. This time, it’s a pandemic that has upended things. The narrator is asked to babysit a miniature macaw, the neatly named Eureka, in the apartment of an acquaintance who has been unable to return to New York before lockdown.
Parrot and narrator settle surprisingly well: “No hours of those strange and anxious days,” she writes, “went by more quickly than those I spent hanging out with him.” But then the bird’s former caretaker and Gen-Z college dropout, Vetch, appears in the apartment kitchen one morning. The unlikely trio must now, somehow, manage the confinement and chaos of lockdown together.
This slender premise – an apartment, a parrot, a pandemic – is as deceptive as the author’s relaxed and meandering storytelling. It’s a testament to Nunez’s writing prowess that the reader will follow her doppelganger narrator anywhere. Keen to avoid her new housemate, she wanders Manhattan’s lifeless streets: lost friends and past loves are recalled and childhood hurts resurface, “brought back by certain powdery or sickly-sweet scents … The fear. The shame.”
Not all of her musings are dark – why are hydrangeas, “like grape clusters, or fat corsages on bosomy bushes”, disliked by so many? – but grief underpins everything, even the funny bits. What does it mean to be alive and alone when the world is in disarray? Why is humanity on a drive to destroy the natural world it claims to cherish? What is the meaning and purpose of the novel? Unsurprisingly, given the shared preoccupations of both narrator and writer, literary references abound: as one quote from Annie Ernaux explains, “How can one reflect on life without also reflecting on writing?”
It is human connection, though, that pulls our protagonist back from the brink. Pandemic days begin to drag and Vetch becomes aware of his older flatmate’s spiralling anxiety; he offers her food, mood-altering drugs and conversation. When their strange lockdown idyll draws to a close, as it eventually must, the reader is left as bereft as the narrator. The consolation, it seems, is the novel in our hands.
“People without hope don’t write novels,” Nunez’s narrator tells us. “I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope. Does that work?”
