The Vulnerables Sigrid Nunez
Animal magic in Manhattan
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: the Covid-19 pandemic.
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.
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.