You’ll need to lock in early to Happiness and Love, in order to get with Zoe Dubno’s style. But it is absolutely worth your initial effort.

First to the style: It is pure stream-of-consciousness. There are no paragraphs and no chapter breaks – start reading at page one and keep going until you hit the end (page 267), at which point, you are well and truly feeling all the things the novel’s narrator if feeling (annoyed, aggrieved, exhausted, amused, enlightened, relieved).

The narrator: Back in New York (a short visit to satisfy visa requirements before returning to London) the narrator – who is a writer – learns of the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca. The narrator has kept a low-profile during her return, principally to avoid the city’s art scene, and all those who identify with it. Once enmeshed through an artist-curator couple (Nicole and Eugene), the narrator now sees the people desperate to be part of the ‘scene’ as self-important, vapid, unscrupulous and ultimately, all hangers-on.

…we were all victims. Willing and supplicant victims of Eugene and Nicole, who forced us to debase ourselves constantly to thank them for their generosity, generosity bestowed on us in exchange for our legitimizing presence – a stay in the beautiful farmhouse in Rhinebeck in exchange for … our seats at dinner, which cost a light debate about politics and aesthetics and also the unspoken promise to eventually yield and agree with them, a price that included lending them the credibility that came from our art making…

Despite best efforts to go unnoticed, the narrator runs into Eugene, who invites her to a dinner party. Put on the spot, she accepts the invitation. The party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, but it is not a memorial. Instead, the dinner is in honour of a young, newly famous actress, whose lateness delays the party by hours.

As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her corner seat, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them – their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them to Nicole and Eugene’s loft. When the guest of honour finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening.

Dubno has created characters you’ll love to hate. Honestly, from page one, I wanted to hit Eugene’s (I imagine) smug face. But at the same time, like the narrator, I didn’t want to waste effort on him. Better to laugh at his ridiculousness.

…a library full of literature, back issues of art magazines, and a section that Nicole and Eugene referred to as theory, which encompassed literary criticism, philosophy, museum catalogs, psychoanalytic studies, and history monographs, all organized under the term theory. They loved reading theory, this single monolithic thing called theory books, which were in reality unified only by the fact that their spines were universally uncracked, their pages unopened, and their ideas, their theories, utterly unknown by their owners.

By no means does the narrator imply that she is ‘better than’. Instead, there is much reflection, self-acknowledgement of her own foolishness, and regret that time was wasted with people whose values do not align to her own.

…I really wish that I had learned to profit off some sort of nobler trade like carpentry or ax-grinding rather than peddling garbage articles to worthless magazines to fill spaces between automobile advertisements.

The story highlights the complexities of being a ‘benefactor’ and it’s potentially transactional nature. The narrator finds Nicole and Eugene’s self-fashioned artistic world ‘…even worse than the old model of patronage…’, noting that –

...at least the court artists knew where they stood … They were employees, they were servants, and their masters required art from them, entertainment, and in turn the masters bathed in the artist’s prestige…

Dubno also highlights one of my favourite topics – to like what you like, regardless of what others think –

The actress, not noticing her hostess, said, I think literally every novel, every so-called literary novel, is just as accessible as something like a pulpy paperback… I see no difference between someone reading Virginia Woolf and Twilight, I see no difference between Bolaño and Ferrante, and I think the people who need the categories, people who believe that by reading Proust they’re geniuses, actually lock people out of having life-changing aesthetic experiences by acting like those things are harder to understand than they really are… Books are funny, books are a pleasure to read, art is meant to coax the viewer into a state of wonder and joy…

I loved the sharpness and snark of the narrator’s voice, and that that was beautifully balanced with moments of self-reflection and honesty. And the final scenes, where the actress dominates the dinner conversation, are priceless.

An author’s note at the end of the book states that the novel took as its starting point Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel, Holzfällen, or translated into English, Woodcutters. Obviously it’s now on my reading list for this year’s German Literature Month.

4/5

I had rapidly become friends with Nicole and Eugene and their group, the same group I now watched eating beluga caviar on marcelled potato chips, the kitsch, appetizing specialty de la maison marrying high and low…