Pandemic Without Panic

The Vulnerables a novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Riverhead Books.  242 pp.  ****

Early reviewers of Sigrid Nunez’ The Vulnerables are linking it to her most recent novels (The Friend, which won a National Book Award, and What Are You Going Through, which was equally deserving of that award), seeing the three books as a trilogy.  The books are all unmistakenly in Nunez’s wise and knowing voice, which characterizes her later work, and they are narrated by older women, who in many ways sound like the same women; she lives in New York, works as a writer, and leads a largely isolated and contemplative life.  People want to fence these books off and say, there!  It’s the wise-old-woman-late-in-life trilogy by Sigrid Nunez.

But for me, The Vulnerables doesn’t fully belong with the other two.  I realize that it involves an instance of pet sitting (in this case for a parrot), as did, most memorably, The Friend (a Great Dane).  The subject of impending death is never far away, as in the other two books. It centers on that peculiar New York problem, where people who aren’t wealthy live in small apartments, deal with various difficulties of their buildings, and often need to find ways to get out into the public, writing in cafes, for instance (my Brooklyn based son, for instance, once found himself rather startled to be sitting in a coffee shop beside Jonathan Lethem, one of his favorite novelists).  All three stories seem to be told by the same fascinating, literate, extremely low-key woman, who has the kind of wisdom that comes from long experience of a quiet bookish life.

But The Vulnerables feels different to me, somewhat open-ended, more tentative, like the pandemic she was writing about.  While the earlier two novels seemed to resolve themselves emotionally in some way, this one doesn’t.  The plot elements do get resolved (the narrator’s apartment difficulties go away, and the parrot disappears from her life, and the pandemic seems to grind to a halt).  But somehow the story doesn’t seem finished.  It’s not quite there yet.

For that reason I would call this a Pandemic novel, a new genre, of which I don’t expect to read many—if any—more.  I recently read somewhere that there is almost no record of the Flu Pandemic of 1918.  People didn’t write about it, though a number of famous writers (Hemingway and Faulkner immediately come to mind, men who were just entering their careers) were alive then, and it was a major catastrophe, killing numbers that seem staggering.  But people didn’t want to write about it.  They didn’t want to think about it.  I feel the same way.  The pandemic was a few short years ago, and it is like a black hole in my life.

Our narrator, then, is a writer who lives in New York.  She is—as the pandemic begins—a vulnerable, which means that (like me) she’s old.  Nevertheless (though people were even afraid of this at the time), she takes long early morning walks in the city, and sometimes sits in city parks, as if just to look at the world that might soon be disappearing for her.  A younger friend who is about to have a baby has taken a trip to the west coast to visit with her in-laws and suddenly can’t return because of travel restrictions, so she decides to stay out there.  She has asked the narrator to pinch hit as a pet sitter for her parrot; the college student whom she hired had crapped out because his classes were canceled.

In the meantime, a doctor from out of town, one of those devoted people who was trying to rescue New York from its plight as a center of the pandemic, is looking for an apartment.  Our narrator volunteers hers, and moves to the much more spacious place that her wealthier friend has occupied.  It even includes a rather large room devoted to the parrot itself, so it can emerge from its cage.  Furthermore, because it is such an upscale building, a number of the tenants have gone off to their summer places in the Hamptons, or someplace like that.  So the building is practically empty, and our narrator, who is an interior person and used to being alone, settles in for the duration.

Then the college student comes back.

I have to admit that, when that first happened, I was disgusted.  I was looking forward to our narrator’s adventures with her new “friend” (the dog who had that designation in the earlier novel became a most vivid character).  And the kid sounded like a mess; he had actually dropped out of college because he didn’t see the point of it, gone back home and fought so much with his parents that they had thrown him out, and returned ostensibly to take care of the parrot but really because he had nothing else to do.  A completely-at-sea adolescent boy.  What could be worse?  Our narrator, not wanting to reveal his “real” name, calls him Vetch.  Perfect.

Except that he turns out not to be so bad.  Our narrator manages to turn an ankle on her early morning peregrinations, and he slowly, very tentatively, begins to take care of her.  Though she, like so many New Yorkers, does almost no cooking and just grazes for her meals, eating the same things again and again (she is a master of the grilled cheese sandwich), he is interested in cooking and food, and adds some variety to her diet.  Furthermore, as a person who has experience with drugs (all his life, actually; his parents began medicating him for psychological problems when he was quite young), he brings some into her life, first edibles, then some joints, and they definitely improve her overall outlook.

As the two of them connect, over some cannabis-aided conversations, we began to realize that his problems with his parents are more their problems than his.  He’s a troubled young man like many of his cohorts, but it’s not particularly his fault.  His parents are the ones who need shrinks (and probably have them in profusion).  And though he has no prospects whatsoever—he’s delighted when he gets a job as a delivery person—I feel for the kid.  His moment in history has failed him.  It’s not his fault.

In some ways I still think this novel is slightly not quite ripe, but it’s a brave novel to have written.  Our protagonist faces the pandemic head on, in New York no less.  The unsettled feeling I have about the book is the way I feel about that whole moment in our history.  The feeling of things being unfinished may be exactly the point.