My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! 

I’ve not read many books so overtly about the two years of lockdown due to Covid, and I wouldn’t have expected being thrown back into that dismal town to be quite so uplifting. But I did find that with Sigrid Nunez’s quirky and charming novel (/ memoir?) The Vulnerables. 

During lockdown, the elderly female narrator, an author, finds herself alone in New York, everyone around her fleeing to their convenient second homes in the countryside. She agrees to pet sit a friend of a friend’s parrot, Eureka, but finds herself in uncomfortably close quarters with the young man originally tasked with babysitting Eureka. Reluctant to engage with him at first, the two soon settle into a fragile friendship centred mainly around getting high and having philosophical discussions.

While I really liked the narrator, I couldn’t warm to ‘Vetch’, as she calls him. I think the point of the book is that everyone has their own troubles and we should be sympathetic, and I absolutely did sympathise with Vetch’s mental health issues. But he would often go on a tirade about how he was lost in this world that was so ‘against’ white hetero cis men - trying to make himself the victim, without acknowledging the privilege he has to not work, subsidised by daddy even though his parents aren’t speaking to him. 

But my issues with Vetch didn’t impact my overall enjoyment of the book, especially the intertextual musings woven throughout. The author/narrator is constantly reflecting on quotes by authors she admires, chewing on them, wondering what they, mainly white European, would make of her, elderly, female, mixed-race. She also obviously thinks a lot about the pandemic and the way it affects the most vulnerable in our societies.

I’m not sure how much of Nunez is in the narrator, but I got the feeling a fair amount - I loved the wry humour and the overall tone of the book.