Sigrid Nunez’s Lockdown Literature

Early on in The Vulnerables, the just-published novel by Sigrid Nunez set during the Covid lockdowns, the narrator comments that the government measures, confining people to their homes and punishing them if they break the rules, are “for the good of all: understood.” Nunez has a penchant for close first-person narration by characters who share her biographical traits—her work has often been categorized as autofiction—so this stands in for the authorial viewpoint of the book. Its milieu and worldview are that of the people who found lockdowns to be obvious. Many of us thought no such thing, however, which suggests that the book will have significant blind spots.