‘I’ve had students say that white men shouldn’t write novels at all’

In the mid-1970s, having recently graduated from Columbia University, Sigrid Nunez was hired as an editorial assistant by The New York Review of Books. There, she would work alongside the influ­en­tial, indomitable and imposs­ibly glam­orous literary ­critic Susan Sontag. “I was so young, I hadn’t published anything at all,” Nunez tells me. “And all I could think was: I want what Susan has.” 

It would be another two decades before Nunez published her semi-autobiographical first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995). Over the next 20 years, she quietly produced another five witty, deceptively jaunty novels, variously concerned with grief and friendship, characterised in each instance by the confiding, anec­dotal voice of its narrator. 

Having remained below the mainstream radar for much of her career, in 2018 Nunez received the National Book Award for The Friend – a spry tragicomedy about a writer who inherits a Great Dane after its owner, a close friend, ­commits ­suicide – and now finds herself, at 72, one of the most feted writers in America. What kept her motivated to write throughout all those years? “I saw good people around me doing the work and not all becoming superstars,” she says. “And I guess I just really wanted this life at the desk.”

Nunez, who lives alone in New York, has joined me on a video call from her home – which feels apt, since her elegiac, tartly funny new novel, The Vulnerables, her ninth, takes place during the Zoom-haunted days of the pandemic. To read it is to feel in intimate conversation with its narrator, a septua­genarian American writer who, during lockdown, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a beautiful, much younger man while ­parrot-sitting for a friend. When I suggest that another sort of novelist might have been tempted to make this odd-couple relationship – forged in emotive circumstances, with a cute pet at its centre – sentimental, Nunez shudders. “I dislike sentimentality,” she says. “For me, what should be replacing the sentimentality is humour.”

And yet, in today’s publishing ecosystem, the comic novel is some­thing of an endangered ­species. “I agree! The great comic writing these days seems to happen on TV. Perhaps people think a comic novel is a lesser sort of novel, however much they love it. You certainly don’t see a Kingsley Amis type any more. Or an Alan Bennett.”