The Vulnerables

September 1, 2023
In Nunez's latest, set against the early days of New York City's Covid lockdowns, a woman finds unlikely--and uneasy--companionship in a troubled college student and his parents' friends' parrot. As in What Are You Going Through (2020) and her National Book Award-winning The Friend (2018) before that, Nunez's subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time. All of that sounds pretentious, or precious, or both. It isn't. Instead, the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else's brain. To the extent there is a plot, though: a woman, an academic and writer--not unlike Nunez herself--old enough to qualify as "a vulnerable," agrees to spend the first days of the pandemic living in the apartment of a friend of a friend to look after their miniature macaw, Eureka, who has been abandoned by his previous collegiate bird-sitter. It doesn't spoil much to say the former bird-sitter--a handsome Gen Z vegan--soon returns without warning, and the pair (or the trio, counting the parrot) become inadvertent housemates. The evolution of those relationships, interpersonal and interspecies, becomes the scaffolding on which everything else hangs. The woman wanders the shuttered city. She has minor interactions with passing strangers, and ruminates on them. ("For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must," she thinks, in her defense.) She grapples with the meaning and purpose of the novel; she recalls a recent reunion with a tight-knit group of college friends. (It is one of those friends, in fact, who facilitates the bird-sitting gig.) "If it is true that an inability to deal with the future is a sign of mental disturbance," the woman muses, "I don't know anyone who is not now disturbed; who has not been disturbed for some time." And yet--despite the grimness of the setting--the novel itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful; there is, it seems, a reason to go on. Sharp--and surprisingly tender.

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September 15, 2023
In the early spring of 2020, an unnamed writer-narrator lives for daily walks, but a friend worries she's taking too many. ""A vulnerable,"" after all, she should be careful. Fittingly for the upside-down pandemic times it takes place during, Nunez's (What Are You Going Through, 2020) elastic and imaginative novel is seemingly about one thing, and then another, but altogether paints a profound picture of layered, human simultaneity. When a friend of a friend, stranded far from New York, needs a parrot-sitter, the narrator sees ""it less as a favor than a godsend."" Eureka is a brilliant-in-all-ways companion. Not so Eureka's original sitter, a college student who suddenly reappears, majorly disrupting the cloistered writer-Eureka love fest. Vetch (not his real name) grows on her, though, and eventually the two get high on the sofa and discuss what question they would ask a dog as Eureka looks on. Calling on a vast store of memories lived, read, and written about, the narrator is serious and silly, optimistic and devastating, lighting readers' way through a dark and disconnected time, joyfully.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 25, 2023
National Book Award winner Nunez (The Friend) returns with a funny and thoughtful story of the Covid-19 pandemic’s early months. As the virus breaks out in New York City, a fictional Nunez lends her apartment to a volunteer aid worker and moves into friend-of-a-friend Iris’s spacious apartment, where she cares for a pet macaw while Iris is stuck in California due to lockdown measures. Nunez enjoys her time alone with the bird, Eureka, and ventures out for walks. One day, Iris’s previous bird sitter, an NYU student she wrongly calls Vetch, in retaliation for his inability to remember her own name, appears at the apartment. Nunez and Vetch split duties and slowly warm to each other’s quirks, as she learns why he was kicked out of his parents’ house. Nunez, who narrates, adds a tongue-in-cheek metafictional element as she considers ways to distance herself from the material, such as by using a pen name (her spell-check program suggests Sugared Nouns, a distortion of her own name). Episodic in nature (like much of pandemic life), the novel shuffles about in fits and starts as Nunez grapples with writer’s block and the fear of getting sick, though her pacing is as swift as her wit. Once again, Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency.

November 1, 2023

In Nunez's (What Are You Going Through) latest, the narrator is a writer in New York City during the COVID pandemic lockdown. Her local friend is stuck in California and desperate for help, as her college-age pet sitter has left New York and her parrot needs food and attention. So the narrator moves into her friend's fabulous apartment and lends her own home to a visiting doctor. The narrator finds solace in caring for her friend's parrot, but isolation takes a mental toll. But then the previous pet sitter suddenly reappears, and the narrator must share the apartment with him. Eventually they begin to connect; they get high, share life stories, and discuss issues. The suspension of normal life seems eternal--then one day it is over. The young man gets a job and moves out, taking the parrot with him. The doctor goes home, allowing the narrator to return to her own apartment. Life begins again. Something vital has been lost during the pandemic, but perhaps hope lingers. Nunez skillfully confuses the narrative--is it fiction or autobiography or both?--and confronts many issues, from mental illness to political chaos to vaccine denial. VERDICT Fans of thoughtful introspection in their reading will enjoy.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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