THE VULNERABLES by Sigrid Nunez

Reading The Vulnerables is like taking a long walk with a friend through the streets of New York City during the COVID pandemic. With pared-down and graceful prose, Nunez explores what the human heart can hold within the confines of space and connection with others. The narrator, a writer, has agreed to house-sit and take care of a parrot for friends stuck in Florida during the lockdown. Because of crossed signals, the original house sitter, who went MIA at the start of the pandemic, returns, leaving our narrator and the Gen Z troubled man to care for each other in an apartment in the city. It’s equal parts exploring the machinations of the politics of 2020 and what it means to be a noticer and writer during one of the most distressing times in history.

Favorite line(s): After the election, it was hard to know what to do with a certain reality. The Black journalist who reported how gleeful her mother was that Trump had won, because now white America will have to face who they really are. The Chinese American man who said he’d voted for Trump because liberals don’t care about Asian people. The young leftist bros whose hatred for Hillary Clinton was so spiteful that all that mattered was that she lose. The millennial who told me about all the millennials he knew who lathed Trump but had been hoping he’d beat Clinton anyway because, with Trump, politics would be more interesting. Every one of these people no doubt believed themselves sane. Day by day, the results of two tallies. The number of American lives lost to the coronavirus: about 115,500 by the end of spring, a total that will almost triple by the end of the year. The number of lies told by Trump from the beginning of his presidency: about 15,000, a number that will more than double by Election Day. He would win again, and if he didn’t he’d seize power and make himself president for life: half the nation thrilled to this. (“So many people love me. So many, many. It’s so true.”) For the first time, an American presidency would be assessed in terms of its threat to American citizens’ mental health.

THE GIN CLOSET by Leslie Jamison

A gritty novel about the poison of addiction that runs within families. Tilly lives with her demons in Nevada, estranged for decades from her family, when her niece, Stella, shows up with a letter from Tilly’s mother after her death. Stella is running from her disenchantment with New York City, an empty affair with a married man, and a career writing speeches for a self-help writer who treats her badly. An odd attachment forms between Tilly and Stella as the latter believes she can help her aunt become sober. Maybe Stella sees herself on the same path as Tilly when she realizes sometimes family isn’t enough. The author writes with a poet’s eye to the language of heartache and brutal honesty.

Favorite line(s): Walking the streets of Lovelock felt like being trapped inside a wheezing body during those moments before the end, everything dragging its heels to slow down for good. I heard the flapping of the tourist sign against the metal of the trailer, the windy clack, clack of the breathing tube doing the work of Lucy’s lungs. We talked about New York, a city she’d never seen, and I gave her the whole parade: the guys playing handball outside the stop at West Fourth, the famous cupcakes that smelled better than they tasted—but they smell so good, I said, don’t get me wrong—and the time I dropped an air conditioner from my bedroom window. I told her about watching one rat eat the remains of another rat on the subway tracks while the A train rattled closer.

“You’re good at describing moments,” she said.

That was just it. I couldn’t’ remember my life as anything but these snapshots, small gestures of sight or reaction that were supposed to suggest the larger truths of my existence.

MODERN POETRY: Poems by Diane Seuss

I’m a Seuss fan girl. Franks: Sonnets blew me away. This new collection riffs musically and with silver-tongued honesty about the labels given to the forms of modern poetry. Where others before her, the Romantic through the modern poets leaned heavily on pretense, Seuss relies on a base-level entry into the poem. “Kindness, like enthralling madness after shock treatments, is first to go.” “The best I ever wrote was in an attic.” “I can’t title anymore.” “I like to call marriage state-sponsored fucking.” Her father’s death when she was a child, her rural upbringing, and her need to dig and dig some more are subjects that propel the Seuss journey—if there is one. She’s everywhere and still and present in front of you all at once. Golden.

Favorite line(s): (From “My Education”): Not just what I feel but what I know and how I know it, my unscholarliness, my rawness, all rise out of the cobbled landscape I was born to. Those of you raised similarly, I want to say: this is not a detriment and it is not a benefit. It only is, it is, like a cobbled house is, fieldstones and mortar, slipshod, spare parts welded crookedly, crudely but cleverly, skinny iron winding staircase leading to the attic bolted on both ends, and up there, a gap in the window where the snow comes in and architects a little drift on the bed.