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 stuck in California, the narrator agrees to house sit their parrot. It’s really no trouble. The parrot, named Eureka, lives in a luxurious apartment in an empty building. All the other well-heeled residents have fled. (“I was struck,” she says, “by how many of the people I knew had second homes.” Me too.)
The companionship is a godsend for both narrator and bird. They spend hours watching each other, amusing each other. “He could hardly have been more grateful for my company than I was for his,” she writes. “I woke up every day looking forward to this simple chore.” And that duty inspires one of the novel’s most touching chapters, which is actually more of a reflective essay on the rejuvenating effects of interacting with animals — “a curb against misanthropy, into which these days it is all too easy to fall.” She moves swiftly from her childhood, to Jane Goodall, “Born Free,” birding and anthropomorphism. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine that the plot has been abandoned entirely, but then, she concludes with devastating effect that the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” “was the kind of story that makes me think I should have changed my life. Instead, I have wasted it.”
Those 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. Much of “The Vulnerables” winds through considerations on how economic class shapes labor conditions during lockdown, the mystery of evil in a world created by a loving God, the calamity of Donald Trump, the problem with people always staring at their phones. At times, these passages risk sliding into low-level rants about the world going to hell in a handbasket. “Why had things changed so?” she asks in one nakedly plaintive moment. Drifting from subject to subject, offering up stray memories, anecdotes and well-polished truisms, “The Vulnerables” seems designed to prove Nunez’s claim that “the traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. . . . No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency.”
But that’s a ruse. “The Vulnerables” isn’t a rejection of the novel as a form, so much as a test of its dimensions. “People without hope don’t write novels,” the narrator points out. “I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope. Does that work?”
Sort of.
Stasis, ennui and writer’s block are painfully common but devilishly difficult to portray in fiction. The very act of bringing depression to life betrays the experience of living with it. Nunez works around that problem, partially, by inviting us into a circuitous search for inspiration in other writers’ works. I can’t remember another novel that felt so stuffed with literary allusions, quotations and references. A fully footnoted edition of “The Vulnerables” would be twice as long. From the opening line borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s “The Years” to her skeptical interrogation of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Nunez name checks a whole library of reading — Edna O’Brien, Rousseau, Norman Mailer, Chekhov, Georges Perec, Günter Grass, Ogden Nash, Jeanette Winterson, on and on. That could sound pretentious, but that’s not the effect here. Instead, it feels like an almost desperate effort to reestablish the architecture of literature in a world where everything has been swept away — like trying to picture each object in the house to calm your nerves on a stormy night.
But there’s a more dynamic thrust to this novel, too, that helps dramatize the narrator’s efforts to remain in contact with humanity as the covid virus separates and isolates everyone she knows. About halfway through, “The Vulnerables,” Nunez introduces a second character — a second human character, that is. One morning, the narrator gets up in the parrot’s apartment and finds a young man snacking in the kitchen. She knows immediately that he must be the first parrot-sitter, the irresponsible kid who flew the coop to be with his friends in Vermont.
He’s flaky and unfocused, and everything about his presence in the apartment — his messiness! his casual good looks! his testosterone! — irritates her. He won’t leave. She won’t leave either.
And then . . . well.
You’ll just have to read it. Or ask the parrot.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
On Nov. 13 at 7 p.m., Sigrid Nunez will be in conversation with Molly McCloskey at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington.
The Vulnerables
By Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead. 242 pp. $28