From Public Books:
After several uncertain weeks this fall, my cat died. Her little life was bracketed by two crises that she was not aware of. I adopted her—a sleek, shy gray adolescent—at the beginning of the painfully lonely and economically disastrous year I first went on the academic job market. Her friendship endured several years of precarity, structured by institutional demands that seemed hostile to security and love. I moved her across the country three times. She liked to lie with her face buried in my knees while I worked. This combination—endless pages, small cat friend—felt just sustaining enough.
The decline of her life coincided with the pandemic. Whereas once my vulnerability created isolation, now isolation was supposed to insulate me from vulnerability. My cat resigned herself to the constant presence of my small children. She permitted their overly enthusiastic affection, hanging out by the oven to warm herself in the very heart of domestic disorder. She grew frail, and her medications tinged her sweet-smelling fur a strange color. But giving her care, unlike the thousand other frantic obligations of stay-at-home life, involved no sense of futility. Many times daily, I helped her as well as I could under the fraying circumstances while awaiting the government protections I was desperate for.
When she was nearing the end, I was haunted by an anecdote from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend (2019), in which the narrator, about to have her aging cat euthanized, finds the cat suddenly alert, looking up at her as if to say, “I didn’t say I wanted you to kill me, I said I wanted you to make me feel better.” I was terrified that something similar would happen to us—that I would not know what help meant when she asked for it, would be wrong about what she needed when. My cat did ask for help, in the end, and I think I did understand. But I continue to turn to Nunez’s work to understand how I heard my friend and what the effort to respond to this small-scale crisis meant, especially in a time when suffering had seemed to reach its outer limits.
In Sigrid Nunez’s fiction, no creatures are more vulnerable than the animals her narrators love. In her recent, high-profile trilogy of sorts, each novel has its own central animal: a dog in The Friend (2019), a cat in What Are You Going Through (2020), and a parrot in The Vulnerables (2023). Though loving an animal can never redress the unsolvable problems her narrators face—pervasive sexual violence, the deaths of close human friends, the pandemic—pets are also never a sentimental distraction. Loving animals is nothing to be embarrassed about; their care is, as her most recent narrator puts it, “one of the few things that … didn’t have me asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
A novel set in the “uncertain spring” of April 2020, The Vulnerables seems to focus on a distinctively human dilemma: how to isolate without losing it, and how to inhabit the uncertainty of when and how the isolation will end. The title embraces the designation of people over the age of 65, including Nunez’s narrator, as “vulnerable.” But like in her previous novels, that category extends much further, especially because an animal is present: challenging, loving, needy, and perceptive.
Why are animals so central to Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction? In some of her work, attending to another’s vulnerability transcends species and prompts storytelling. In What Are You Going Through, the narrator briefly encounters a talkative cat at an AirBnB while visiting a friend who, suffering from terminal cancer, is planning suicide. The novel dramatizes the difficult effort to understand someone else’s private experiences, and it opens with an epigraph from Simone Weil—“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” The question implies the paramount importance of attention to others’ afflictions. Nunez uses a light touch in drawing on the work of this stringent French philosopher, but Weil’s impact is evident everywhere. Weil understands vulnerability and affliction to be the basis of our existence as creatures in the world, and the only useful response to be “complete attention.” This demands letting go of the self and becoming fully receptive to another, but “the capacity to give attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”
In Nunez’s novel, such contemplative and self-effacing attunement is difficult for the narrator to achieve; even the effort is hard for her to tolerate. But one night, the cat jumps into her lap to tell his life story: “I had a decent home, the cat said, his words muffled by the purr but still clear.” Although the narrator has not asked him Weil’s question, the cat answers it, describing his exposure to human violence on the street and affirming the love of his adoptive human, his “second mother.” The narrator listens, reacting appreciatively: “He told many other stories that night—he was a real Scheherazade, that cat.” What Are You Going Through never questions why the cat can speak to the narrator or highlights the moment as an unexpected violation of the novel’s overall realism. In all his fictionality, the cat models one of Nunez’s core values: he speaks to ubiquitous vulnerability on a difficult night, and in doing so sustains the narrator’s intense attention, preparing her for future acts attuned to the needs of her dying friend.
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