The Brooklyn Rail

With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life. There are those who will lazily call this a pandemic novel but it’s so much more than that. Instead, this is a window into the life of a writer, a woman who is both one of “the vulnerables” and a force to be reckoned with. From the epigraphs to the final words of the book, Nunez’s word choices are exact—illustrating both the depth of her relationship with a vast body of work and her ability to depict life.

Because many of us who experienced the pandemic in New York City have been urged to “move on,” to “get back to normal,” it can be possible to forget how it was. Even though the memory is, as they say, held in our blood and our bones. Trauma is like that—held in the body. And it was a terribly traumatic time, but there was also a strange beauty: empty streets and parks bursting with blossoms, random music from half-empty apartment buildings. Nunez begins her narrative with “It was an uncertain spring.” It’s a sentence that aptly describes March and April of 2020 and is also the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s The Years. This sentence leads Nunez, as do many of her references to others’ work, to writing about writing. Here she argues against—or at least questions —the common advice to “never open a book with the weather.” And yet, she argues: Woolf, Dickens, among so many others who do. Then, repeating Woolf’s line: “It was an uncertain spring,” Nunez draws the reader back to the present and writes about her (or, if you prefer, her close first-person narrator’s) daily pandemic practice of walking through the city. It’s a tactic that moves the text from the more cerebral talk of writing to the physical action of walking, drawing us in to the experience of the “empty” city. It’s also deeply compelling. There were a few of us out there walking all through that spring. Although some people were still commuting, still working, there were wide swathes of Manhattan sitting empty. Most of us who still had “office” jobs had shifted to working from home. I used lunch breaks, weekends to visit parks; a neighbor went out at five on weekdays to walk Second Avenue. And yes, as Nunez writes, there were so many flowers: “the magnolias putting out their petals … the cherry blossoms … daffodils … gaudy tulips….” Nunez uses tulips to recall Sylvia Plath, Rilke, and Elizabeth Bishop. But, gracefully, she draws us back into her narrator’s walks: “I went from park to park. That’s where the flowers were.” She begins to peel back the layers covering grief, almost sneaking up on it: “Early on, before the playgrounds were closed, I took comfort in watching the young children, or even just hearing their trilling voices as I sat on a bench nearby … I enjoyed watching the dogs play, too, before the dog runs were closed.” And we all know what’s coming. What happened after.

Nunez describes her narrator’s individual experience of the pandemic but there are so many points of commonality: “I had lost the ability to concentrate. It was only the news that gripped my attention, the one thing I wished I could ignore.” A friend scolds her for going on long walks, telling her she’s “breaking the rules, and you know it. A vulnerable, she called me. You’re a vulnerable, she said. And you need to act like one.” But what does it mean to act like “a vulnerable”? While she is out walking, she’s out in the world, she’s alive. But the loneliness is there—as it is in so much of modern life (pandemic or no)—and she can’t find relief: “during the same time I found myself unable to read, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to write again.” And though, obviously, she did begin to write again, there is at the core of the book a question that is central for so many of us: “I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.” For Nunez’s narrator, this mourning is akin to the “seam of grief” felt by a man whose twin was stillborn, a feeling like “something is missing. Something has been lost.” But this grief is also “at the heart of why I write.” But there is humor here too—a wry dig at an editor who cut a reference to Madonna in something Nunez (her narrator?) wrote, saying “it would not be long before readers would have forgotten who Madonna was.” Ha! And, this same editor condemned Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections with, “That’s a terrible title. It will sell three copies.” We can almost see Nunez’s smile.

Moving back to a short time before lockdown, Nunez writes about a reunion of friends at the funeral for their mutual friend Lily who’d died suddenly. Along with reminiscences about Lily, there are also conversations between the friends (all women) about love, sex, marriage, gender hierarchies, grief, and literature. It’s a very normal moment that lets us not only learn more about their collective pasts and friendships but also serves to contrast against the drastic changes to come. “It was the last trip I’d be taking—the last time any of us would be traveling anywhere…” and, of course, there is the realization that if Lily had died later, there would have been no reunion of friends and likely, no funeral—another part of being human that was taken away during the pandemic.

Once Nunez’s narrator is back in New York City, problems arise. First, Iris, a friend of a friend, is stuck in California and needs someone to care for her parrot Eureka. Because Iris is wealthy and lives in a condo building, her neighbors “had fled, like so many other New Yorkers, to their country homes.” (Note: I don’t know many of those kind of New Yorkers.)

The narrator then takes us on a side path to write about pandemic birding, pandemic pet adoption, and the “solace taken from watching animal videos.” As she points out, birding became so popular because it was the spring migration combined with the joy of “paying close attention to something one had always been too distracted to notice before. Something ordinary. Something beautiful.” She reminds us of the national obsession with Craig Foster’s My Octopus Teacher and what we can learn from being in close proximity to wild creatures. Of course, there’s grief here too at how little regard so much of humanity has had for nonhumans: “Think of all the extinctions that might have been prevented, how our own species, how the whole planet might have been saved.” Of course, she forgets those cultures who do value our interdependence with the Earth and all living creatures when she describes “the human drive to make the world increasingly ugly, and in the end, to trash it.” Not all of us, not everywhere.

Another problem then arises: a volunteer healthcare worker has been evicted by frightened neighbors and needs a place to stay. So Nunez’s narrator moves into Iris’s luxury apartment full-time and the unnamed healthcare worker moves into the narrator’s place. And so begins the narrator’s relationship with Eureka, the little green parrot which brings her moments of joy. But also, the narrator also considers the contrast between the large apartment (the parrot has his own room) and so many who survive in so much less space. Then a third problem appears: the college-age son of a friend of Iris’s shows up at the apartment and stays. The narrator is not pleased with the situation “His name was an uncommon one that begins with V. I’m going to call him Vetch.” Unfortunately, he would have to stay, Violet and Iris both tell her. It’s hard to sympathize with her friends and their total lack of understanding. But, eventually, the narrator and Vetch reach a sort of awkward arrangement—avoiding each other, keeping different hours, and the space is large enough for this to work. Finally, they drift into something resembling friendship—encouraged by edibles and vegan ice cream.

In one of the narrator’s many long walks through the city, she’s accosted and spit on by the cyclist in the balaclava that used to also ride up and down Second Avenue—I assume it’s the same guy. I saw him try to terrorize a woman standing at my local busstop but a shop owner scared him off. Nunez’s narrator wasn’t so lucky. After the incident with the cyclist, she retreats into her borrowed bedroom. But despite Vetch being one of those “young people born to privilege, raised in privilege, and forever railing against privilege” his care for her is lifesaving. She suffers from bouts of vertigo and nausea and stops eating and so Vetch begins to give her edibles and they seem to help. The text then shifts to a consideration of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and the narrator begins her own series of vignettes starting with the repeated prompt “I remember.” We learn a lot about her childhood and memories and moments that inform her writing. We also learn that she and Vetch have been “smoking weed or microdosing every day” and talking extensively about life. And then Vetch leaves, taking Eureka the parrot with him and leaving Nunez’s narrator alone, happy for them both but also heartbroken.

Although not a novel in a traditional sense (what does that really mean these days?), this is a moving contemplation of lockdown, extinction, the nature of human friendship, and one writer’s profound engagement with writing and the nature of hope. As Nunez’s narrator riffs on Flannery O’Connor toward the end of the text: “People without hope don’t write novels. I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope. Does that work?” Yes, I hope so. Because, really, aren’t we all vulnerable?