Virginia Woolf began The Years, the last book she published in her lifetime, with the weather. “It was an uncertain spring,” Woolf wrote, and Sigrid Nunez uses the very same words to open her ninth novel, The Vulnerables. Here, the spring in question is that of 2020, and the narrator is suddenly “coming across words that would soon be overfamiliar – Wuhan, wet market, lockdown, quarantine”.
Perhaps Emily Dickinson was right when she wrote that “Hope is the thing with feathers.” That’s a conclusion one might reach, in any case, from reading Sigrid Nunez’s probing, delightful and masterful new novel, “The Vulnerables,” whose most endearing character is an erudite green parrot named Eureka.