Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno
The contemporary art scene of New York is skewered in this witty if somewhat surface level novel
In Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, readers will delve into the heart of New York City’s contemporary art scene, where the rich and unaccomplished children of famous artists host dinner parties for writers, intellectuals, and the next big movie stars. Over the course of one of these ‘cultural evenings’, drinking wine in an expensively decorated Manhattan apartment, a young woman watches her old circle of friends — the one she thought she had escaped years ago — and quietly muses about how much she hates them all.
Dubno’s novel offers a modern reinterpretation of Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, and much like in Bernhard’s portrait of an artistically decadent society, the narrator in Happiness and Love monologues for nearly the entirety of the book about consumerism, the transactionality of relationships, and the pseudo-intellectualism of her peers.
The diatribe is witty, often funny, and surprisingly engrossing; the pages fly by even if the plot consists of little more than a woman sitting in a corner. It also shows the narrator’s hypocrisy in a satisfying way that reveals the real complexity of the social dynamics she condemns.
Happiness and Love is a smart and entertaining debut, but if its plot is borrowed from Bernhard and its ideas come unadulterated from Bourdieu and the last century of Cultural Studies, the book’s proposal can be reduced to another account of a woman’s love-hate relationship with her privileged New York lifestyle.
