Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception ... This one comes across as a Covid diary, with a light scaffolding of incident to hold its meditations up. The narrator’s interactions with the parrot are funny and moving ... I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. But Nunez is a closer observer than most, and she is wittier ... Like certain storms, this novel churns intensely in one place. There is a bit more plot ... I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny — good and strong company ... You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.
Slim, ruminative, by turns wry and witty, with a reluctantly aging, exceedingly well-read, writer-narrator very like Sigrid Nunez herself, all three novels are marked by their author’s formidable intelligence, refusal of simple answers or reductive pieties, and eccentric blend of profundity and playfulness. All three are stuffed with quotations from philosophers, poets, and novelists, meditate on the writer’s calling and the value of writing in an increasingly commercial world, and address suffering, disappointment, and loss with honesty and humor ... Haphazardly constructed and overstuffed, crammed with news headlines and anecdotes, lines and observations from other writers. After an arresting first few pages about life during the pandemic, we flash back, and almost 70 pages are devoted to a group of old friends reuniting at a funeral for one of their circle and to the childhood memories that surface as a result. Their discussions about cancel culture in particular feel a bit hackneyed ... But once we enter the pandemic in earnest, the novel hits its (ambling) stride ... At 242 pages, The Vulnerables is about 30 pages longer than its predecessors, and the extra weight makes it less nimble. It is a bit less disciplined and a bit less emotionally powerful than its trilogy-mates, and Nunez’s snark about identity politics and 'our brave new cultural world' feels a bit too querulous and tetchy this time around. But to say that The Vulnerables is the weakest of the three books is merely to say that it isn’t a flat-out masterpiece, so high has Nunez set the bar.
Little explosions of pathos detonate periodically through this story — their power even more impressive for the way Nunez repeatedly lulls us into the comfort of her wry, ruminative voice ... I can’t remember another novel that felt so stuffed with literary allusions, quotations and references.
A novel of uneven intimacies, of, perhaps, unrequited love ... Loose and meandering. The wandering, almost essayistic, quality of Nunez’s prose is appropriate to its plot, in emulating the felt precarity of those early days of the pandemic ... When it comes to Nunez, she always says the loud part quietly.
With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life. There are those who will lazily call this a pandemic novel but it’s so much more than that ... This is a moving contemplation of lockdown, extinction, the nature of human friendship, and one writer’s profound engagement with writing and the nature of hope.
Such is Nunez’s great talent: she can make us care about anything ... 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 ... 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.
Deeply observant ... The narrator’s voice: bookish but unfussy, wry ... The rhythm that she writes to is the rhythm of an interesting, and interested, mind.
She is driven by questions about what kind of literary work best suits our times, which leads to reflections on the conflicting views of a multitude of her favorite writers ... Ms. Nunez gracefully leaps from big emotions, including grief, to erudite literary digressions or biting wit ... The Vulnerables manages to be both playful and dead serious about forging an effective variant of Woolf’s proposed essay-novel. Ms. Nunez concludes: '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.' This inventive novel adds tongue-in-cheek humor into the mix.
But the pandemic’s influence extends even deeper into the novel’s form. Its prose exhibits a static quality—as if the writing itself is trapped inside, unable to leave the house or go about its business ... The effect is scrapbook-like—a modern version of medieval florilegia, in which scholars would craft collections of quotes and aphorisms, the phrases like pressed flowers pasted onto the page. The novel’s citations, sensations, and memories feel like such a collection: a set of preserved blooms ... The Vulnerables captures that sense of pandemic plotlessness through its static assemblages: anecdotes, feelings, quotes, fears, gripes, slogans, last words, movie trailers, metaphors, 'things a person with a cell phone might have been tempted to snap and share.' The novel immerses us in this collection, guiding us through meandering thoughts that make no claim to narrative payoff ... But the novel’s most valuable accomplishment is not merely its ability to walk Jameson’s tightrope. It does something that goes beyond either story or scene: it gathers elements and, without subordinating them to grander significance, finds a way to simply hold them together ... The novel’s most valuable offering comes from its ability to gather elements and hold them together, as we wished to hold one another. In this respect, love pervades every page.
Who better to write a 'pandemic book' than the godmother of contemplating empathy and connection? ... about how we navigate the bizarre and hostile climates we’re still living through; how we find meaning in being there for each other in some capacity: 'A cure for many ills, it’s been called. For the alleviation of stress and anxiety; for comfort in mourning, sadness, and loss: find someone who needs your help.' There are quotable, thought-provoking lines on every page of this book, which is not merely a 'pandemic book,' but a novel that cracks open windows and offers a reassuring breeze, reminding us that it’s OK — and perhaps even necessary — to need each other; it’s only human.
Nunez adroitly turns each of the characters...into the titular vulnerables, confronting exposure to illness, isolation, rejection, homelessness, and death ... A spare, remarkable novel featuring an unnamed narrator contemplating the nature of writing fiction amid the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Calling on a vast store of memories lived, read, and written about, the narrator is serious and silly, optimistic and devastating, lighting readers’ way through a dark and disconnected time, joyfully.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez could be marketed as a pandemic novel. But that would be selling it short. For The Vulnerables is a profound novel of ideas that explores grief, aging, friendships, writing, literature, and death. This exquisite work defines and redefines the very notion of a pandemic novel through its playful, yet meditative, unconventional form and content.
...classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer’s block ... But as a writer and academic thoroughly steeped in literary theory, Nunez knows that a conventional marriage plot is not an option in contemporary fiction, not 'with the world on fire and its systems collapsing… with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope.' Plus, someone like her likely would have thought that he was not just too troubled but also too young. And so, their unlikely friendship becomes just one more oddball incident in this elegiac essay-novel.
Nunez skillfully confuses the narrative—is it fiction or autobiography or both?—and confronts many issues, from mental illness to political chaos to vaccine denial ... Fans of thoughtful introspection in their reading will enjoy.
Despite the grimness of the setting—the novel itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful; there is, it seems, a reason to go on. Sharp—and surprisingly tender.
