You remember the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. Amid fear and uncertainty, we washed our canned goods and made masks out of scrap material. We took walks and watched birds. We planted gardens. We ordered DoorDash. We hunkered down in our homes, wondering if the world would end.
In her new novel, “The Vulnerables,” author Sigrid Nunez recounts those days in vivid detail, with the bittersweet essence of hindsight. Her nameless narrator is an older woman and a writer — someone old enough to be considered a “vulnerable” in pandemic parlance — who agrees to spend the first part of the lockdown living in a luxurious New York apartment, looking after a friend’s miniature macaw. The bird has been abandoned by his college-age bird-sitter, and when the young man returns without warning, our narrator finds herself quarantined with a stranger.
The novel reads like a memoir, as the narrator describes that bizarre period in recent history through a series of everyday interactions and observations. She’s a writer who’s trying to write, but she’s so distracted and overwhelmed, she can’t even read more than a few paragraphs at a time. It’s a feeling many readers, including myself, can relate to.
With her earlier novel, “The Friend,” Nunez explored loss and grief, and discovered that humor belongs on that spectrum. Here, too, she finds that “elegy plus comedy … is the only way to express how we live now.”
“Just because something isn’t funny in real life doesn’t mean it can’t be written about as if it were,” the narrator says. “Funny might even be the best way to write about it.” And it never hurts to have an animal sidekick.
