Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, The Vulnerables, emerges from the words of others. The first line comes not from the narrator herself, but from another work she now barely recalls. From there it’s a deluge. In barely a couple of pages she quotes Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In a single paragraph, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop.
Nunez has long been an allusive writer, attuned to the literature that shapes her outlook. Her narrators – Nunez standins – frequently suspend their train of thought, seeking guidance from the writers they admire. The effect is ruminative, charming, a touch eccentric. Here, though, a note of anxiety hums beneath the bookish surface. Many of the quotes address the problem of how to begin, drawing attention to the lack of establishing detail. Is a subject being sought, or nervously held at bay? As the focus tightens, we see what the narrator has been circling:
“There were days when I stayed out a long time – up to three or four hours. I made a loop. I went from park to park. That’s where the flowers were. Early on, before the playgrounds were closed, I took comfort in watching the young children, or even just hearing their trilling voices as I sat on a bench nearby. (Not reading, as I would have been doing in ordinary times. I had lost the ability to concentrate. It was only the news that gripped my attention, the one thing I wished I could ignore.) … Weren’t we all reduced to the state of children now. These were the rules: break them and you’ll be punished.”
This arrival into our recent collective trauma reshapes the preceding material. That blizzard of quotes and allusions was a coping mechanism: a search for meaning in the already-named; an appeal to a state of attention now ruptured.
In Nunez’s 2018 National Book award winner, The Friend, an adopted dog offered comfort and a connection to the deceased. In The Vulnerables, a parrot provides a vital connection to life. A well-heeled acquaintance is stranded abroad; their housesitter has fled. The narrator visits daily, tending to the bird in his bespoke Manhattan pad. Soon, she moves in full-time. “An entire luxury boutique building and a full staff,” she notes, “all for one little old bird and me.”
It’s a low-stakes, high-privilege setup. No acute wards here, no intubated patients or bodies stacked in the street. The pandemic is an atmosphere, not an event. Are we really to care, against the backdrop of global plague, about a writer in a penthouse with a parrot?
Such is Nunez’s great talent: she can make us care about anything. As with the novels of Rachel Cusk or Emmanuel Carrère, the “auto” in autofiction feels inadequate. These are novels that give gracious space to the lives of others. In Nunez’s work especially, the concerns of the moment are rendered not as clumsy drama, but as living subjects of conversation; sites of intimacy and disagreement. Listening as the narrator and her friends tackle the perennial subject of appalling male behaviour, we are drawn by the conversation’s range not towards judgment, but productive tension. “I can’t say how many stories I now see,” says a publisher friend, “that deal seriously with the question of how we’d all be better off in a world without men”.
These elevated, expansive exchanges don’t only allow for nuance, they reveal the narrator’s resting state, the way she approaches the world’s challenges most comfortably when she finds them in their safest form: as ideas. It’s a talent and, Nunez hints, a weakness. When reality intrudes more forcefully, the narrator’s contemplative gaze seems to falter. Buying a coffee after her habitual walk, she unthinkingly leans on the counter, drawing a sharp reprimand from the barista. Shocked, she stands on the street and cries. “Why did he become so angry over such a small thing?” she wonders. “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. There’s no understanding people’s behaviour these days. Don’t even try.”
Through such moments – intimate yet charged with the sprawling unknowability of a threatened and threatening world – we are asked to consider anew the significance of that opening barrage of quotation. Are we not told (“endlessly”, as Nunez herself writes in The Friend) that reading makes us more empathic? The narrator seems caught between empathy and uncertainty. She does in fact know, logically, why someone working in a cafe may be more agitated about physical proximity. And yet somehow she talks herself out of that knowing; convinces herself, even, that understanding isn’t possible at all. We know that she knows a great deal, and yet we see too where what she knows falls short.
This feeling – the sharp actuality of experience piercing the comfort of the known – ultimately assumes physical form. The previous housesitter returns unexpectedly, intruding on the narrator’s solitude. He is young, opinionated, rumoured to be unstable. The narrator feels at first unsafe, then, as he makes himself at home, merely irritated. With his youthful swagger and easy rapport with the bird, it’s clear what he represents: not the threat of death, but the unavoidable arrival of life. When the moment of tentative understanding we’ve been moving towards arrives, neither literature nor intellect engender it. Instead, a cannabis edible softens the tension, offering precisely the kind of loosened rationality, the casting off of certain aspects of the self, that so often in Nunez’s work arises through an encounter with an animal.
Do the things we know truly serve us? Is the literature we love of any use when the world we inhabit capsizes? Nunez’s doubt feels necessary and valuable. How remarkable, then, that her work, and all the doubt it contains, still reassures us, and leaves us, as the novel reaches its extraordinarily hopeful and disarming last line, with the feeling that we have been helped.
• The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
