The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

The New York Times –bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection.

Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Novels, New York

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2023

About the author

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and The Believer. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature.

Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. In spring, 2019, she will be visiting writer at Syracuse University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[zuza_zaksiazkowane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Po „Przyjacielu”, który bardzo średnio przypadł mi do gustu, po „Słabszych” sięgnęłam bez żadnych oczekiwań, a może nawet z lekkim dystansem. Myślałam, że pióro Nunez jest po prostu nie dla mnie.
Oh boy I was wrooong.
To była fantastyczna książka. Błyskotliwa, inteligentna, charyzmatyczna i piękna w swojej dziwnej prostocie. Czytajcie 🙌🏻
Jedyne co mi się mniej podobało, to bardzo istotny motyw koronawirusa w tej historii, co trochę psuło mi delektowanie się fabułą. Przeżyłam tę pandemię, nie za bardzo chcę o niej czytać 😂

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wasn’t long ago that the word “vulnerable” became a defining word in our covid-19 world. The vulnerables were the feeble ones, the ones who needed protecting. It was a time that being over 65 became “really old”. Seniors had been skydiving, running marathons, trekking across the alps, but in 2020, seniors became part of “the vulnerables”.

I became a fan of Sigrid Nunez after reading “The Friend”. I found her observations, reflections, and meditative writing witty and perceptive. Her latest work, “The Vulnerables” is about a “mature” narrator who is in NYC when the virus hits, bringing the city to a standstill.

Nunez stealthily composes a story on aging, loneliness and isolation. I did not know that hydrangeas are old lady flowers (just ask Madonna). In Nunez fashion, the story ambles about, reminiscing on Valentines’ Day card giving in elementary school, Joan Didion being duped by hippies, common Trump nightmares, “cave syndrome”, interview questions, to name a few topics. Also like “The Friend,” Nunez uses a pet for comedic release. In lieu of a 180 lb. Great Dane she has a macaw parrot. Parrots have emotional issues and can go unhinged if not pampered. The bird needs a minder, and our narrator is just the minder.

Unfortunately, our “formally-young” narrator must share the apartment with an attractive young male. She wanted to be alone. Their relationship goes from hostile to aloof to warm. It’s through their changing relationship that the book reflects the narrator’s thoughts on writing, life, and everything in-between, in other words, the Nunez magic.

I highly recommend this incredibly entertaining novel.

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vulnerable: “Capable of being physically or emotionally wounded.” This might be a pandemic novel, but there’s a whole lot more here than the vulnerability of people to disease - which is a positive point for me, because I wasn’t all that excited to read about a virus that is now part of our everyday lives. I was more interested in the emotionally wounded parts of humanity. Whatever that says about me. Probably relatability or empathy or whatever. The narrator of this novel (or memoir, depending on whether you choose to believe everything within these pages came from the author’s own experiences or not) speaks to us directly about a range of topics. Yes, the plot (whatever plot there is) does wind its way through the early days of the pandemic in New York City. However, this is a quiet novel without rhetoric or politics or grandiose scenes of fear or panic. It’s mostly one woman’s thoughts about life – growing up, writing, reading, and love. Personally, her reflections on the reading experience itself resonated with me quite a lot.

“Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.”

There’s also much to absorb here regarding the novel as a form of writing itself. Which parts of it are pure fiction and which are influenced by an author’s own experiences? Does it matter if the result is to evoke those questions and feelings as noted in the above quote? The narrator speaks of writing love stories, of the nature of male characters and the role of male writers in contemporary times.

“… there is no narrative more prone to distortion than the memory of a love gone wrong.”

“It was in all the songs, but here was proof that those songs were no exaggeration. A thing that could come on you and devour you like an illness. An ordinary boy who had nothing against you could take you down… Love as punishment, as mockery and cruelty. The horror of that.”

Then this conversation between the narrator and her women friends:

“… it struck me now how unused I’d become to reading anything about men that puts them in a noble – or even a decent – light. Not that it was like that in real life… when men appear in fiction now it’s usually to be criticized or denounced for something... however many exceptions there might be, it’s part of the male character to want to take care of those who are more vulnerable. And I have depended on that quality in men, and I have benefited from it. We all have.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the significance of the parrot on the cover of this book. The narrator is tasked with caring for an acquaintance’s pet parrot, Eureka, while the owners are unable to extricate themselves from California when travel was essentially banned. While performing this duty, she is thrown together with a Gen Z college dropout who returns to the apartment after a fallout with his parents. An unlikely friendship develops along with some lively conversation. Oh, and there’s some subtle humor amidst all the meandering thoughts! You’d have to be able to laugh occasionally to make it through such madness.

“The sanest woman we knew, a happy, loving, and responsible wife and mother who just liked to fuck a lot and who, to keep everything running smoothly, needed a slew of lovers, supplemented with one-night stands.”

In the end, I had tremendous appreciation for the author’s writing skills and brilliant, thought-provoking ideas. Ultimately, it lost me just a little because of the digressive nature of the story. That’s on me though, simply because my head space right now is much like Sigrid Nunez’s narrator’s mind! I need to feel a little bit more grounded from the outside at the moment. Still, I’ll be sure to read more of her work soon.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I like Nunez better with every book I read, of which this is the third.
She does ramble, or maybe meander is a better word, but I like her meanderings, they are on point and do increase your understanding, and are very interesting. The plot here is very loose, just like in The Friend. It's early 2020 in NYC, the pandemic is in it's early days, meaning the world shut down and no one really knows what's going on. Our narrator is an older woman writer who loans her apartment to a health care worker and moves into an upscale home nearby to pet sit a parrot whose owners are stuck in California. Things go well til a young man shows up needing a place to stay, and the owners are friends of his parents.

As I said there is a lot of back and forth with the narrator quoting other authors, trying to cope with her own writer's block and inability to read and concentrate, her thoughts on everything under the sun, the young man's problems, and the way the world seems to be coming apart at the seams. The point being that we are all Vulnerables in one way or another.

"There's no understanding people's behavior these days. Don't even try."

This is not a depressing or sad book at all, but left me feeling some hope about coping with the world to come, whatever it brings. There's still laughter and love and good people in the world and we will continue to find each other. And there are still books that remind us of that.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5. This gave me what I wanted, Nunez’ chatty, witty, seemingly tangental thoughts on grief, death, connection and isolation. The Vulnerables widened the lens, however, being smack in the middle of the pandemic: grief and death were literally more wide-spread, and climate concerns made their way into this work, as well. “The Friend,” and “What Are You Going Through?” were more intimate in focus.

My favorite social commentary, here, however, was on how information during the lockdown became suspect, and how even our own perceptions felt distorted and therefore, less trustworthy than ever. Nunez referred to Didion’s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Annie Ernaux’s, The Years, to highlight how we can’t rely on memory: I also wondered if she was turning to other stressful times in history (the 1940s and the 1960s) as a way of normalizing what we were going through? Either way, I always enjoy references to writers and books, and here the metaphor enhanced my appreciation of all three works.

I was also happy to see a return to the human-animal relationship Nunez did so well in The Friend, and overall I liked this one a little better than “What Are You Going Through?”

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not the first time that Sigrid Nunez – a stunningly insightful writer – has integrated an animal story into her novels. In her book The Friend, it was a Great Dane; in Mitz, it was a marmoset.

Here the animal in question is a miniature macaw, Eureka, an intelligent and sociable bird who is left stranded after his human “parents” are unable to return home after COVID hits, and who is abandoned by his collegiate bird-sitter. Nunez writes, “You want to care about all the animals, even the tiniest ones, you understand how vulnerable these animals’ lives are, how vulnerable all lives are.”

It is from a place of vulnerability that Nunez’s character, an academic and a writer, ruminates about life, the future, and the essence of reading and writing in the midst of unprecedented times. The unnamed character, who bears resemblances to Nunez herself, spends the early days of the pandemic in a luxury boutique New York apartment with a troubled Gen Z college vegan and the colorful (in every sense of the word) bird, Eureka.

For weeks, she finds it impossible to write. What is the point? The purpose? How can one invent stories, say, about a made-up heath care worker when so many people are heroically giving of themselves each hour? What can writing—or reading – offer in such dark times. Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.”

That is what Sigrid Nunez presents to us in The Vulnerables. And that is why I passionately recommend this book, particularly for those of us of a certain age. The insights, that range from our much-needed connection to nature to the use of the writer’s prompt “I remember” to artificial generational barriers to important people in one’s past – it’s all here and expressed eloquently. Well-known writers are quoted as the narrator seeks to find her own truth.

This novel relies on interiority, the nature of memory, and the necessity of navigating the troubling times we live in yet hope shines through as well. It’s a book that made me think and feel, and I am so grateful to Riverhead Books for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even before I worked through all the toilet paper I’d panic-bought during the pandemic, I was receiving novels about covid. The books seem to arrive more frequently than new booster shots. Gary Shteyngart’s “Our Country Friends,” Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence,” Ali Smith’s “Companion Piece,” Jodi Picoult’s “Wish You Were Here,” Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake” and others fill the shelf of our era’s ever-expanding covidature. Of course, it would be exceedingly strange if novelists ignored the pandemic that killed millions, transformed work life and gutted cities, but, talented as these writers are, it’s getting harder to resist a kind of literary vaccine fatigue.

Sigrid Nunez raised the alarm early. Her 2010 novel, “Salvation City,” describes a devastating flu epidemic. Now, in “The Vulnerables,” she turns her attention to 2020 and the actual pandemic we all endured. Once again, death marches across the world, but there are unnerving benefits, too. “I couldn’t help feeling guilty about the pleasure I took in the lifeless streets,” she says. “To be the only pedestrian, block after block, to have an acre of Central Park to yourself.”

That unnamed narrator is an older New York novelist who sounds a lot like the author so many readers discovered in 2018 when she published “The Friend,” which won the National Book Award for fiction. Early in this new story, as death rates soar, a young acquaintance admonishes her to be more careful about spending so much time wandering around outside. “You’re a vulnerable,” the woman tells the narrator. “And you need to act like one.”

For the most part, she does. In fact, the story’s fidelity to the nature of life under lockdown results in a plot with a dangerously faint pulse. But “The Vulnerables” also captures the weird arrangements that the virus made common. “We were all living,” the narrator says, “with the sense that, at any moment, some inexplicable new story would unfold.”

Sure enough, one does. When a friend of a friend is. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first time reading Sigrid Nunez and I can already tell that she’s about to become another favourite author. Look at this small sample of her crystal clear, smart, and thought provoking writing from page ten of my edition:

I know of research studies of twins, including some whose co-twin did not survive birth. For many of the survivors, the result has been lifelong feelings of loss, pain, emptiness, and guilt. In one case, a man who was not told about his stillborn twin until he was well into adulthood described experiencing huge relief. At last he had an explanation for the aching void he had always known; why through every joy in his life, no matter how rich, ran a seam of grief.

I know, right?!
How on Earth?!

For me, the subtle and slightly sarcastic sense of humour behind these words is just magical.

And this excerpt is just one of many, many others I could’ve picked to share with you here.
Okay, just another one, then:

When you’re having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man—homeless by the look of him—digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain’t nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.

Aha!
So clever, really.

For a book that has basically no plot, this was also moving, funny, and profound.

My third novel (second in a row) set in the early days of the pandemic and, once again, I thought this was all very well done - anyone looking for fear mongering, panic attacks, and melodrama should look elsewhere.

Theme wise, is safe to say that this book seems to go all over the place but, in reality, and like most of my favourites, it all comes down to trying to understand our place in this crazy mess of a world.

To read this novel felt like catching up with a good old friend, and I can’t wait to get my hands on all of Sigrid Nunez’s backlist.

[Ken]

As a writer, zero expectations is what I cherish most from a reader. I say that because I see it at work as a reader myself. Sometimes I approach books with high hopes. Nowhere to go but down, sadly. Then there are books like The Vulnerables where I bring no expectations to the table. How lucky for Sigrid Nunez!

For one, it's a Covid Lockdown book, and I've had little luck with that sudden genre treating the winter-spring of 2020 (here's looking at Our Country Friends in particular, and many a poetry anthology that wishes it went viral). And it opens as a kind of middle-aged ladies "buddy" deal. I always feel a bit out of place, listening in, but I found I liked a lot of what I overheard, especially the voice of the narrator-let's-face-it-author.

See, she's a writer too. And author of previous books (none of which I've read). And a teacher (more for me to relate to). She alludes so much to this background and raids her writer's notebook so often that the book quickly becomes catnip. Can I roll in these herbal bushes a bit? Thank you!

The setting is New York City, a place made more holy for lack of people. I remember waking at 5 a.m. in the city once and walking from my hotel to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Practically no one was about. I felt like I owned the joint, not like some out-of-place country boy (my usual role).

Anyway, to the book's rather simple set-up: Narrator bird-sits (the cover!) for a friend stuck in California and about to have a baby. Only there's more than a bird to deal with, as the previous bird-sitter, a college dropout, reappears after a fight with his parents in Vermont. The place is big enough (we're talking money here) for the two to coexist, but our narrator's none too happy. Still, she perseveres.

Not only perseveres, but goes off on these worldly tangents. Episodic and delightfully uneven, the book chugs along on its own wit and intelligence. Nunez loves Joe Brainard's quirky book, I Remember (which I remember loving too) and uses it to teach her student writers. Meanwhile, she riffs on many writers Goodread readers are familiar with like Joan Didion, Chekhov, Coetzee, Borges, Winterson, Céline.

Do readers love reading about reading? Rhetorical question.

A little reading/writing example quote:

"If you're having trouble concentrating, goes the advice, try writing very short things. One writer I know suggests experimenting with just a title and a single sentence.

The Celebrated Novelist

Explained in an interview that he went from writing novels to writing poetry after learning that the celebrated poet John Ashbery wrote for only one hour a day."

And another:

Proud Author

The pleasure of seeing a beautiful young woman reading his novel on the L train was somewhat spoiled by the fact that she was moving her lips."

Pretty funny, that.

In any event, parrot notwithstanding, the character and point of view were so singular and charming and erudite and wry and wistful that I downed the whole thing in a day. Greedy like. Like you get at times with certain books offering zero expectations but generous calories.

Now the tough question: Ruin a good thing by trying another Sigrid Nunez? I can't help but bring high expectations, after all.

Sigh.

[Alex.andthebooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Te przemyślenia o pandemii, o pisaniu, o życiu i doświadczeniu, a także przemijaniu niezwykle do mnie trafiły.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this even more than The Friend. I've seen a few reviews that say this book wandered all over the place. I have a feeling I read a different book.

Sigrid Nunez' style is one that I love - self-deprecating, funny in parts, strange in others. The Vulnerables is a perfect description of life in lockdown without all the hand-wringing and soul-searching. The author takes the part of lead character. Alone in lockdown New York she finds herself pet/house-sitting for a friend whose quick trip to California before her baby is born turns into an extended trip.

Stuck in the friend's flat the author takes long walks, sometimes amongst the crazies but more often alone. She falls in love with Eureka, the parrot who is even more needy for attention than friends or family. Then the original sitter returns unexpectedly and the two form an uneasy friendship.

The Vulnerables is about all vulnerables - the parrot, old people, sick people, lonely people, society as a whole.

Frankly I didn't want this book to go anywhere else. I forced myself to ration it out so I could enjoy it for longer. I enjoyed all of it immensely. I'd highly recommend this book to fans of Nunez or those who've never read her before. Either way, you should read it.

[Southern Lady Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5/5 - Rounded up to a 4) When reading this... I was reminded that I don’t have to agree with everything to gain something from an author’s perspective. I enjoyed the general stream of consciousness on the current state of one character’s experiences with grief, loneliness, and the soothing power of bonding with animals.

-short read (242 pages)
-Some political/social commentary - if that’s not your thing you won’t like this

-- favorite quote: ‘You start to care about all animals, even the tiniest ones, you understand how highly vulnerable these animals’ lives are, how vulnerable all lives are.’
*CWs: discussions surrounding the pandemic etc are big themes in this book

See the full-color review, reading guide and continued reading suggestions here on IG!

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really enjoyable pandemic novel that in many places doesn’t read like a novel, more like a memoir of a writer. Lots of literary references and musings on writing, reflections on the lockdowns and the effects on the people who stayed at home (so yes the main characters are basically all well off and not essential workers). The narrator is a writer (the author herself?) and the main portion of the novel she is staying in a friends apartment to look after her parrot, Eureka. But the plot isn’t the main thing and I enjoyed the flow of ideas, making it a pleasure to read.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured this short novel about a female writer (perhaps not unlike Nunez herself) in lockdown in the first seasons of Covid in Manhattan, who is in a strange apartment with a charismatic parrot and a young man who is supposed to be away at college, but -- well, this is the spring of 2020 -- isn't. While the world is unraveling, the two of them don't do much. (Imagine.) And yet every page of this book was a treasure for me as a writer and as a reader. Focus on the whole section that begins, "I remember," or the character cameo of an editor who recalls a childhood movie with the line, "Let the men do it," and instantly sees a wry title for a novel. Nunez is not merely an astute and beautiful writer. She is also very, very funny.

[Scott Baird (Gunpowder Fiction and Plot) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible. At some point this author actually said the novel is the easiest form of writing... If it's so easy, why can't you do it?!?!?!!!

[CanadianReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nunez employs essentially the same fragmented, allusive, meditative format for this novel that she used in the two fictional works that preceded it. I felt the approach was much less effective here. This novel lacks the focus and drama of the earlier books. One dealt with the suicide of a former lover and the narrator’s inheritance of his large dog. The other concerned the protagonist’s terminally ill friend’s request for assistance in ending her life.

The Vulnerables is set during the Covid pandemic, which was strike one for me; I’m just sick of reading about lockdowns and isolation at this point. Babysitting a parrot just didn’t compel me either; Nunez was not able to make me care for the bird—strike two. And strike three: the lack of any real tension in the female protagonist’s having to cohabit with a male university student, the original bird-sitter who defaulted on his care-taking responsibilities but then decided he really hadn’t after all. He returned to the apartment where the protagonist had installed herself and the two had to get along. Ho-hum.

I was interested enough to complete the book. This is Nunez, so of course it’s calmly and fluently written, but I found it a rather limp novel overall. Yes, there are the requisite pithy literary allusions and some observations about the state of the world. Marriage, fidelity, psychedelic drug therapy, and Me-Too all figure—among other things. Nothing really startling or particularly thought-provoking, though. For me The Vulnerables lacked both emotional and intellectual resonance. Disappointing.

[Dylan Kakoulli · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope.

Not for me.

This book was all over the shop -and not in a good, fun, I’m all on board for the ride kinda vibe.

I honestly feel like synopsis of this book is completely misleading.

Instead of a; “story about modern life and connection”, we have an entirely disconnected -almost “academic” exercise in writing style narrative.

Which not only lacks focus, but any greater depth and/or meaning.

Not that all books need “meaning” of course.

Though for a book toted as being a “meditation on our contemporary era” and an “inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself”, this book felt disappointingly dull and almost insufferably pretentious in her abundant use of literary quotes and references.

Granted I have been v fortunate to have received an advance copy, so perhaps the final product will be slightly more refined and less ‘end of term class project’.

But for now it’s a big, red F from me.

1/1.5 stars max

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
Of the dark times." Brecht

More and more I suppose we will be seeing books written in the lockdown of the pandemic.
Writers stuck to their own devices especially in NYC likely turned to their computers and writing to pass the endless days. This book, the latest by Nunez is one. I wasn't sure I cared to read another covid experience book but this was Nunez and I loved her last two novels and it was fairly short so I gave it a try.

With Nunez I find I never know if the story she writes is based on her own experience and embellished into a novel or a fictional novel with invented characters. I decided this novel had to be based on her own experience and that it didn't really matter.

It is a covid story. In NYC, what Nunez calls the epicenter of the pandemic, the main character (always the first person I) is asked by a friend to take over a bird sitting gig while the friend is stuck on the west coast in the early days of the lock down. What at first was believed to last only a week or two, turns out to be months and months. The main character finds herself living in an apartment not her own, caring for a large parrot who likes to play games and then the young man, who was the original bird sitter that fled the apartment when it became clear he might not be able to leave, returns. Suddenly she finds she is attempting to stay 6 foot apart in a living situation with this stranger.

The writing covered many aspects of life during the lockdown: how diets and concentration changed, how living in isolation especially for New Yorkers was difficult and so unusual and scary, the turn to the media for reassurance which seldom came. Much rang true and I felt there are so many stories such as this one that each and every one of us could tell about the year and experience of 2020. How Nunez describes it I could relate but she adds much of the character's inner dialogue that is humorous, insightful and full of interesting anecdotes that carried this short book for me. I didn't like it as much as her last and I think it will fade quickly yet I still find Nunez's style one I enjoy and will be watching for her next.

P.S. Her use of the word vulnerables first in being labeled one during pandemic and later in its repeated use to describe others and situations is one of the delights of the book. I did especially love the word play of this.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend and What Are You Going Through are both on my favourites shelf. Weird, because looking at their structure, they are not really that different from The Vulnerables. Animals, talking about writing, and… well, here is where it deviates, really. The other two, I suppose, were directly about animals, writing, and death. Some form of dealing with death. And in a more convoluted way, so is this one. But it’s a COVID novel. So yeah.

I don’t think we are anywhere near far enough away from the pandemic for writers to be distilling down lessons and grand narratives into novels. Anything I have read on this topic so far makes me immediately tired, as if I am back into my confinement, going stir-crazy. I don’t know why, and anytime I have said that to others, I have often gotten a weird look (and that’s on the nice end of the spectrum of reactions – I love checking in on this review of Ted’s once every few months to see who else is triggered that he could dare to rate Elizabeth Strout’s garbage rant on COVID a 1-star). Maybe it’s too visceral. Maybe it never invites a contemplative mood. It’s too immediately tied in with diffuse punching out, political unrest, and insanity. A reminder of those times is needed for sure, and I think I will eventually be able to read a similar novel. The message in all of them is the same (important, but the same): tolerance is important, acceptance is important, and we are trapped in a cage within a cage. How that message is delivered just now is a bit trite, faded, and a little cringe – much like those stickers on the base of Toronto’s subway trains reminding you to maintain a social distance of 6 feet.

There is less of what I love about Nunez’s books – talking about writing and books and authors and literature. If she had a 500-page book coming out about that, I would be pre-ordering it right away.

But, as always, we move.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like in her award-winning novel The Friend, which followed an unnamed female author (closely resembling Nunez herself) as she comes to terms with loss while accompanied by an animal, her latest novel explores the writing life and features a parrot named Eureka.

Perhaps this protagonist is even the same character from The Friend but this time her preoccupation is why writers write, the purpose of a novel, literary reflections on gender and generational differences, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The novel is imbued with so much empathy and hope for the future, even when times are grim. There's a lot of looking back on past works of literature—many allusions and direct quotes from writers Nunez clearly admires; a book for book lovers!—as well as contemplation on memory, especially as one gets older.

It reads like a scrapbook, where you can see the full picture coming into place as you zoom out and each individual piece begins to blur into a whole. She draws on her youth through to the present in a widening scope that feels both incredibly particular and yet universal.

I admired her boldness in confronting and challenging writes like Joan Didion (the absolute takedown of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a real laugh), while still admitting that the wisest among us are those who aren't afraid to say, "I don't know."

It's melancholic and elegiac without leaning into despair. A beautiful story for our times and one that places Nunez as a seasoned professional with wisdom to share.

[Thank you to Riverhead Books for an advanced reader's copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

[John Banks · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

I adore Nunez's contemplative, wise fiction. There's no literary fireworks or 'complexity' in what she does, but there's a goregeously refined and compassionate quality to her writing that I value. It's elusive and far from simple, yet also very allusive, and it's this combination that I treasure. I loved her earlier book, 'The Friend', which won the 2018 National Book award. It was a meditation on friendship and grief, featuring a wonderfully realised relationship the central character builds with a dog.

The Vulnerables is a first-person narrative (written in an auto-fictional mode) set in 2020 New York about a woman, a writer, who moves into a Manhattan apartment owned by a well-to-do friend who has left for their second home to wait out the Covid pandemic. This apartment ends up shared with a parrot, Eureka, and a young man, named Vetch by the narrator, who has dropped out of college and has various personal, including family issues. He, too, is bunkering down in the apartment through Covid. There are delightful, wryly observed passages covering the occasionally uncomforable, fractious realtionship as they cohabit through the pandemic and the cross-generational and, in the case of the parrot, cross-species connections that they eventually find with each other. As with Nunez's earlier "The Friend", there are thoughtful, beautiful observations about the significance of our relationships with animals and the meaning this brings to our lives, even with the issues associated with anthropomorphism. In this case, it involves the narrator's realtionship with the Parrot she's caring for.

Throughout The Vulnerables, you have a sense of that sharp, writerly eye roving and wisely commenting on the state of things as the Covid crisis descend. There's a quality of deep-seated anxiety pervading this book that's about much more than Covid. There's a quality of self-reflection and contemplation that never becomes a cloying navel-gazing that auto-fiction can risk. I think it may be Nunez's capacity for humour and wry wisdom that I value so much about her writing, keeping this at bay. There's also much in here also about the state of American culture, politics, and the continuing relevance (or not) of the novel and writing through all of this. This includes astute comments about Annie Ernaux's personal-narrative, auto-fictional works, Prousts's In Search of Lost Time, Georges Perec, the significance of remembering for narrative, a telling critique of Joan Didion's essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", quotations from Dickens, Plath, Virginia Woolf, and so much more. This could so easily become incredibly, boringly, pretentious. In Nunez's capable hands it just isn't. Reading 'The Vulnerables' is like sharing a conversation with a wise literary friend who is also penetratingly funny. Through this layering of references and allusions, Nunez presents us with the materials that I think can provide some hope for continuing to make sense of the chaos and disintegration we're experiencing recently. For this reminder about how writing and literary culture continues to matter in our lives and times, I'm deeply grateful. There are, however, carefully placed observations about how fragile and vulnerable all this is, as well as the challenge of maintaning meaningful and compassionate connections with each other.

There's gentle, compassionate wisdom in these pages; Nunez's voice is a treasure and more than just a comfort in our troubled times.

[Peter Boyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The latest effort from Sigrid Nunez is set in New York during the early days of the covid pandemic. Our narrator finds herself living in the apartment of a friend named Iris, looking after her pet macaw Eureka. All is going well until the previous bird-sitter shows up, an NYU student whom she takes an initial dislike to. Nicknaming him Vetch, the two avoid each other at first, but the ice gradually thaws and they begin to get along. On her forays outside the apartment in a deserted city, the narrator ruminates over the people she encounters and thinks about her life as a writer.

Readers familiar with the work of Nunez will know that there is never much of a plot in her novels. The story is just a minimal frame on which she hangs her various observations of life. As always, she is witty and perceptive - there are paragraphs of clarity and wisdom which I couldn't help highlighting in my Kindle edition. However I did find this effort rather slight, and not quite as thought-provoking as her previous books. It was almost as if she said to herself: "The pandemic is on everybody's mind right now, I better write something about it." And though I'm not sorry I read it, for me it was less engaging than the likes of The Friend and What Are You Going Through.

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

The same clean, thoughtful, gently acerbic writing as The Friend. Although I read it in print, the feel was as if Nunez read it aloud - or more accurately, chatted it to me over a cup of coffee one long afternoon. It feels like a book about being rather than doing, although that's not to say there's no doing or dynamism in the novel. It's more than just ruminations, but those ruminations are so striking that they do collect in the mind, especially the ones about writers and writing.

But it wasn't just women choosing to show men in a bad light, she said. I see the same thing in most of the manuscripts I read by male writers now, too... male writers bend over backwards to emphasize the superiority of their female characters. I meet the same paragon in book after book: high IQ, great personalty, firm moral purpose, dazzling wit. And the trick is to get it across that she's also very attractive without ever appearing to be somehow disrespecting her. It would be funny if it weren't so boring. But the truth is, no man today would ever attempt to create an Emma Bovary or an Anna Karenina.

I keep thinking that can't be true, but I also can't think of a Madam Bovary of today, written by a male writer.

[Jaclyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the most part I really did not enjoy this book. It’s the third in Nunez’s semi-autobiographical novel trilogy. I adored the first two. Here, Nunez’s protagonist is locked down, first alone and then with a young man and a parrot. I found the first half painfully aimless and the second half frustratingly rushed and disjointed. The final section is a self-indulgent collection of quotes from writers on writing. I actually liked that section because I love that stuff but come on. Nunez is usually much sharper than this. There are times early and late in the book when she seems provocative simply for provocations sake. This is the first lockdown novel I’ve really disliked though so that’s something.

[marta (sezon literacki) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ Moją ulubioną książką Nunez wciąż pozostaje „Przyjaciel”, ale ta była całkiem dobra.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a luminous, digressive novel set during the early, lockdown phase of the pandemic in New York City, in which a writer named Sigrid Nunez moves into a luxe apartment to look after the parrot of a wealthy couple who are stuck on the other side of the country. This is just the merest framework for the book, which includes many observations gathered on her daily long walks around the deserted parks and streets, and reflections gathered during a long writing life, and so much else besides. In reflecting on the nature of her book, the writer says, “I like the way a translator of Proust straightened us out about In Search of Lost Time: ‘Not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction, but rather, the opposite, fiction in the guise of autobiography.’” I am such a fan of Nunez’ style and her calm, lucid way of seeing that I read this in a single sitting. If you want a straightforward narrative in which a series of events unfurl, this may not be for you, but if you’re open to a sensitive, intelligent gathering of thoughts about a specific time and place and the paths it takes the author (and her readers) down, this is the ticket. Improbably entertaining, but wildly so for me.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining, wise and comforting. I really did not want to read a "pandemic novel", but it's mostly just the setting for a more calm than nervous novel about an older woman's unusual state of being when she befriends both a parrot and a young man that she normally both would not interact with. At times it felt like listening to a smart older friend tell me about her life. This is the second Nunez book I've read, and now I really want to read more.

[Shadab · Rating 4 out of 5]

To all Sigrid Nunez fans, I am happy to report that we are in for a treat with this one. It's quintessential Nunez—a heartfelt novel about writing and reading while making sense of and finding hope in today's world. My copy is filled with highlights, as is always the case with Nunez.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a huge Nunez fan after reading The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and especially A Feather on the Breath of God. Her last three books have been very much of a piece: autofiction voiced by an unnamed woman who has a duty of care towards a friend or a friend’s pet and ponders, in wry meta fashion, the nature of autobiographical writing and the meaning of life and death at a time of climate breakdown. Alas, The Vulnerables seems like no more than a rehashing of The Friend, with flanking main characters chosen at random from central casting: a parrot named Eureka and a mentally ill college drop-out called Vetch. This quirky trio is thrown together in a lavish New York City apartment during lockdown and nothing much happens but conversation brings them closer.

A second problem: Covid-19 stories feel dated. For the first two years of the pandemic I read obsessively about it, mostly nonfiction accounts from healthcare workers or ordinary people looking for community or turning to nature in a time of collective crisis. But now when I come across it as a major element in a book, it feels like an out-of-place artefact; I’m almost embarrassed for the author: so sorry, but you missed your moment. My disappointment may primarily be because my expectations were so high. I’ve noted that two blogger friends new to Nunez were enthusiastic about this. That’s not to say this wasn’t a pleasantly fluid and incisive read, even if its message of essential human vulnerability is an obvious one. Anyway, I’ll take Nunez musing on familiar subjects over most other contemporary writers any day:

“Never write ‘I don’t remember,’ Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.”

“You can start with fiction or start with documentary, according to Jean-Luc Goddard. Either way, you will inevitably find the other.”

“I like this clarification by the narrator of a book by Stendhal: ‘It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.’)”

“Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? / Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.”

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Lisa Kusel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A melancholic stream-of-consciousness ramble through a woman's mind during the pandemic.

I liked Eureka, the bird.

I liked Vetch--his defiance and self-assuredness reminded me a lot of my own 22-year-old.

I appreciated some of the smart quotes she shared. I appreciated her aloofness and comfortable aloneness. She is someone I would be happy to lunch with.