Book: THE VULNERABLES
Author: Sigrid Nunez
Published by: Virago
Price: Rs 699
Sigrid Nunez’s book is a wryly charming yet poignant musing on life, its uncertainties, and the (un)likely attachments we form to give it meaning and substance — a delicate balance that stays remarkably on point despite the grim uncertainty of Spring 2020 against which the narrative unfolds that ushered in Covid-19 and a long, uncertain lockdown with no reprieve in sight. The sudden shock of the pandemic and its unsettling early months are filtered through the solitary consciousness of an unnamed, elderly female writer who rather unexpectedly finds herself in an upscale Manhattan condominium lending company to a friend’s spirited pet macaw named Eureka after the friend gets quarantined on the West Coast and cannot return anytime soon. The duo is subsequently joined by the bird’s former sitter, a troubled Gen Z college
drop-out, whom the narrator nicknames “Vetch”.
The humans have their share of demons to battle with: the narrator is facing a writer’s block, she cannot concentrate, and her thoughts seem to wander on random things like death, ageing, old friends, and olden times. Her recurring bouts of insomnia, nausea, and vertigo do nothing to ease her situation. Vetch, on the other hand, has to bear the burden of a less-than-happy relationship with his well-heeled parents to whom his birth was an accident best avoided, a non-committal girlfriend, and a meaningless college curriculum that gets him nowhere. Suffering from recurrent depression, he tries to find meaning in his life by taking recourse to drugs. It is an uncomfortable relationship at first yet the forced intimacy of a shared space with nowhere to go brings them together. Nunez delicately plays on the trappings of a love story as when the two share a joint, get high, and have long philosophical conversations deep into the night, though she is pragmatic enough (in a brutally
unromantic way) to thwart any expectation of an unconventional fling between them. So, as the weather turns warmer and Vetch sleeps on the terrace, the narrator regrets not being able to join him: “He made me feel like I was really missing something… More: there wasn’t much doubt in my mind that, had we been closer in age, I would
have been sleeping up there with him.”
However, the book is less about this unusual friendship than a metafictional rumination on the practical difficulties of creative writing in times of crisis, a point hammered home through the rambling, disjointed nature of the work itself where every now and then the intrusive narrator punctures the narrative with half-remembered anecdotes, memories, and quotations from other literary works. So when Vetch finally decides to leave the apartment to put up “with two roommates who needed a third” and takes Eureka with him, the narrator “watched them go: out of my life, out of my novel.” Those who expect a novel in the traditional sense of the term may well give this a miss. But for the discerning reader, this is a book that promises to surprise.
