While The Vulnerables is a pandemic story, it is more an exploration on the thought process of a writer in isolation.
Through a friend, our narrator is house sitting a large apartment in New York to look after Eureka, a parrot. Soon, she is accompanied by an unwelcome guest, and they must cohabitate due to the eccentricities of their mutual friends.
However, this simplistic plotline is not what drives the narrative forward, but rather the chaotic, though easy-to-follow, ramblings of our narrator. She draws on a wealth of knowledge, paying homage to many great writers and thought leaders, extracting their ideas and questioning them in healthy, internal debate.
Often, she leaves open-ended thoughts and provides an answer a page or two later, as if she was simply Googling the information while continuing to speak to the reader. Her musings are thought-provoking as she draws on socio-political events in history, from Joan Didion to Donald Trump.
Moving into the second half of the book, we lean deeper into the interior of our narrator. This does slow the pace somewhat, but is a clear reflection of someone sinking inside themselves the more time they spend shut away.
This book was a delight to read and balances humour and weighty topics. The writing is strong and lends itself to a fast-paced literary novel, which is no easy feat.
If you’re someone who likes books that make them think or see things in a different way, this is the book for you.
Reviewed by Annika Tague
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It was also a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, London Review of Books, and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Her story “The Plan” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her essay “Life and Story,” originally published in The Sewanee Review, was selected for The Best American Essays 2023. Her work has been published in more than thirty countries.
Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She lives in New York City.
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