Book review: Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables a pandemic conversation between elderly woman and Gen Z boy

The Vulnerables

By Sigrid Nunez
Fiction/Virago Press/Paperback/242 pages/$21.50/Amazon SG (amzn.to/48oq8uA)
4 stars

Told from the point of view of an elderly woman sequestered in a posh Manhattan apartment during the pandemic, American writer Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables is essentially an extended monologue.

Its form sits in the grey area between fiction and non-fiction – the essay novel, where narrative is just a thin scaffolding to support meandering thoughts running easily in and out of bounds.

Nunez’s stand-in – an unnamed “I” – ponders a world crumbling under the double horrors of Covid-19 and the Donald Trump presidency, which take a toll on her body and leave her unable to concentrate.

But on her walks around the green spaces in New York, she also assesses the merits of beginning a novel with descriptions of the weather, and men’s continued usefulness in a feminist world – “as a child I always knew that there was a difference between the ways your mother could protect you and the ways your father could protect you”.

She acts as caregiver to her friend’s pet parrot, this animal solace a recurring motif in Nunez’s writings.

While outside red-tailed hawks and bald eagles reclaim Central Park during the lockdown, she reflects on the ethics of breeding animals as pets.

At one point, she references James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich’s 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher. “Anthropomorphism,” she laments. “We should have made it our religion.”

Perhaps enough time has passed since the world was knocked off its axis, but there is a certain nostalgia and welcome in reading Nunez’s sensitive capturing of a particular pandemic zeitgeist, admittedly accessible only to those of some privilege.

The lack of social interaction and ample space give Nunez’s character a wealth of time for reflection, and she gamely takes this on, the lockdown providing a real-world conceit perfect for this type of autofiction.

Yet, this exercise never feels stale, mainly because Nunez is so engaging and bounds nimbly from idea to idea, never sermonising.

She picks out connecting ideas among her influences, from the late writers Joan Didion to Allen Ginsberg to director Jean-Luc Godard, reducing each to just one or two lines that fit into a fortune cookie.

A whole chapter can be formed this way, proceeding along the lines of “I like that X said this”, and “Also Y’s idea that...”

In one of these, she rationalises her eschewing of fiction thus: Irish novelist Samuel Beckett once said that eloquence about disaster will not do, while Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami is more evocative: “The time for Scheherazade and the king – the storytelling time – is over.”

There is ingenuity in Nunez’s injection of certain “social scenes” that allow a chorus break – for instance, recalling pre-lockdown drinks with friends that sees her recreating the polyphony of debate.

Midway, a Gen Z boy comes to stay, igniting horror in the woman but later becoming a spokesman for generational values.

“Bringing more people to our affluent level is only going to destroy more ecosystems, kill off millions more plant and animal species and make more and more of the earth uninhabitable,” he says, advocating for a reduction in consumption by all.

The two perform a sort of rapprochement that is oddly comforting. The Vulnerables will probably not change your mind about anything, but could be something better: a veteran writer reaching out to you and telling you that you are not alone.

If you like this, read: The Inventors by Daryl Li (Rosetta Cultures, 2023, $28, TrendLit Publishing, go to str.sg/8mVG). Singapore author Daryl Li’s meditation on writing and memory similarly connects disparate threads together.