The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). In this ruminative novel set during the COVID pandemic, the narrator, an intellectual living in New York, lends her apartment to a visiting pulmonologist and moves into one belonging to acquaintances who have decamped to a suburb, leaving behind their pet macaw. Her living arrangement is soon disrupted by the unannounced arrival of the previous bird-sitter, a college student. At first, the two keep to themselves in a largely peaceable coexistence. The narrator’s most unsettling experience takes place outside, when a man taunts her and coughs in her face, an event that underscores her “vulnerable” status. Rather than dwelling in despair, Nunez’s book expands into a meditation on pain and the formation of unusual intimacies.
At Night He Lifts Weights, by Kang Young-sook, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (Transit). These stories are populated by isolated characters who exist in crumbling worlds sometimes governed by the logic of dreams. The public water supply is contaminated; foul smells infiltrate the air; a group of men with money troubles vanish all at once, leaving their wives to roam in search of them. Everywhere families are splintered, their members “turned back to the television screen, to the kitchen sink, to the phone, to the doll that babbled when you touched it.” But this malaise dissolves once the characters attempt to connect, as when a woman who is separated from her husband realizes: “I wanted to tell him that now—now was the time for us to love each other.”
