© ALBUM / ALAMY
The Vulnerables—as its title hints—is the American writer Sigrid Nunez’s contribution to the swelling cohort of novels that deal with life under lockdown. Her setting is Manhattan in early 2020 and her narrator is an older woman writer—old enough to be considered a “vulnerable”—who finds herself confined with two unlikely flatmates: an angry young college dropout to whom she assigns the moniker “Vetch”, and an affable but narcissistic green-plumed parrot named Eureka. “He really likes to strut his stuff,” the macaw’s owner tells the narrator. “He’s seen himself in the mirror, and he knows how gorgeous he is.”
The unnamed narrator makes daily visits to this friend-of-a-friend’s empty apartment to feed and check in on their beloved pet bird while his owners are stuck in California. When another friend—a pulmonologist who’s volunteering her services at one of the city’s hospitals—needs somewhere to stay, it makes sense for the narrator to offer up her own compact flat and move in with Eureka. As it happens, though, not long after her arrival, another house guest appears: the son of a couple of Eureka’s owners’ friends, who himself had been caring for the bird before he fled New York to quarantine with his parents in