On page 1 of Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel The Vulnerables, she (or, rather, her nameless narrator) writes: “Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.” 

I personally don’t care much what happens in a novel, or whether anything happens at all (unless plot is all there is, in which case it better be good). What I love best is the kind of book where it doesn’t matter because I could listen to the narrator talk for hours about anything, and be perfectly engaged, amused and inspired. And The Vulnerables is the best example I’ve met in a long while. If plot is important to you, this might not be your book. There is only the faintest whiff of one — an NYC writer (old enough to be dubbed “vulnerable” but, as a novelist, not “essential”) during early Covid agrees to petsit a friend-of-a-friend’s parrot, and finds herself with an unlikely quarantine companion — and it is probably mentioned or acted out on fewer than 1/4 of the book’s 242 pages. (I believe the first mention of it comes on page 73.) It’s a good plot, what there is of it, but it’s not really the main draw.

The main draw is the character — a deep well of anecdotes, opinions and insights, especially with regard to novels and novelists, vulnerability and essentialness. Is the “I” here the voice of a made-up narrator or is she Nunez herself? Whichever she is, she has thoughts on that too. 

“Elegy plus comedy” — a phrase she attributes to an unspecified friend — is her own perfect summation of the book. I read the last page, turned right back to the first, and read it again. Consider yourself forewarned: this won’t be the last you hear of it here!

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[ IMAGE: Photo of books including Sigid Nunez’s The Vulnerables. The book it’s making eyes at on my coffee table is Paul Rand “A Designer’s Eye” (which I got from Available Items). And it’s on top of Jack Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, which I just realized is funny because not only does Jack get a mention in the Nunez novel, but the one line I remember from reading it ages ago was that we are all “visionary flowers in the air.” ]