A fun and quick read on many nihilistic but also existential traits of life through a writer’s perspective during one party in New York.
I liked the writer’s ruminations, cynicism, wit and the overall scene/setting of this novel.

3.5 stars.
This could have been slightly shorter or slightly conceptualised and structured for a stronger effect. Though, I may be wrong, as it reads like a stream of consciousness, flowing thoughts by the protagonist.


The themes 5/5 stars.

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno explores friendships and grief and art and literature and wealth with a narrator trying to work out what is actually important and matters to her.

The opening lines of Zoe Dubno's brilliant debut novel Happiness and Love immediately grabbed me:

'While everyone was waiting for the actress to arrive from her premiere, I sat in the corner seat of the white linen sofa at Eugene's with my legs crossed, watching the rest of the party and regretting my decision to attend. I was surrounded by the very people that I had spent the last five years avoiding, people who had taken advantage of the death of our friend Rebecca to drag me back into their cathedral of modernist rococo on the Bowery.'

Which the reader immediately realises is a very deliberate take on Thomas Bernhard's The Woodcutters, in David McLintock's translation:

'While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation. I had not seen the couple for twenty years, and then, on the very day that our mutual friend Joana had died, I had met them by chance in the Graben, and without further ado I had accepted their invitation to this artistic dinner, as they described the supper they were giving. For twenty years I had not wanted to know anything about the Auersbergers; for twenty years I had not seen the Auersbergers, and in these twenty years the very mention of the name Auersberger had brought on third-degree nausea, I thought, sitting in the wing chair.

Yes this is the Woodcutters transported from 1970s Vienna to 2020s New York. The unnamed female (male) narrator has returned from London to New York (Vienna) after some years away, first to learn of the death of a friend Rebecca (Joana) through a drug overdose (suicide) and then, on the Bowery (Graben) bumps into some formerly incredibly close acquaintances Eugene and Nicole (the Auersbergers) who they have not seen and indeed actively avoided for five (twenty) years, and are invited to an artistic dinner party that evening by the sexually predatory couple, where the guest of honour will be a famous actress (actor) coming from their premiere, and the death of their mutual friend honoured only perfomatively. The narrator sits in a corner sofa (wing chair) analysing the other guests, more than interacting with them, ripping their artistic pretentions to pieces, although not without some fondness.

Happiness and Love however can be read, indeed perhaps deserves to be read, in its own right and as a stand-alone work, and, the initial set-up aside, is not a rewrite, so I will drop the parallels from my review from this point (although note some Bernhardian language). I would urge people to read Happiness and Love and The Woodcutters but only because they are both great novels.

(hopefully also the characters here are, unlike Bernhard's, entirely fictional and the book won't end up in lawsuits!)

This is one of those novels where I highlighted half the book on my Kindle copy, so a few favourite quotes to give a flavour:

An extended piece on the different way an artist who is the child of a great artist can deal with the situation, all of which inevitably lead to failure in one way or another, ends (Nestbeschmutzer of course a term often applied to Bernhard himself for his acerbic takes on his native Austria):

'But perhaps the most difficult option for the child of the great artist is to become a Nestbeschmutzer and innovate past the work of their father or in reaction against it, inevitably ensuring that they will suffer the fate of usurping their beloved parent, which will likely haunt them until the end of their lives or estrange them from their parent forever.'

When the rich hostess Nicole seems more concerned that the narrator has the correct pronunciation of an artist whose work she owns, rather than show her and discuss the work itself:

'In this way the rich, through their ownership of art, not only soil the piece for themselves, by adding it to their hoard and reducing the work of art to an object like a clock radio, but also ruin it for all who attempt to enjoy the piece because they so often believe that they, the owners, are the sole authority on the work, the only ones who can truly understand it. They believe that by purchasing the work, that in exchange for handing over the cash, they receive from the artist not only the piece but also the key to what it means, but of course they never do understand the work, they are the people that understand the work least in the world, they are the destroyers of the work. And though there are so many ways that the rich can destroy the art that they buy—licensing it to fashion brands and tech ads, cluttering their walls to create a disgusting mismatched gallery of their hoard —Nicole had destroyed her collection in the worst way, the way that rich people with good taste and with artist friends destroy their purchases. In a rapture of cognitive dissonance they love great art but derive great shame trom hoarding artwork, they are embarrassed by their riches so they lock their art away in storage so that their addiction to accumulation-and, more importantly, their taste— can never be commented on.'

Talking about the sort of shallow art the host Eugene produces (and sadly I'll admit to some sympathy with the public in this quote):

'It was written up as a blockbuster show of contemporary art, and the show really was packed, and I noticed that the public would read the wall text before looking at the piece. They'd enter the gallery and look directly at the wall text and then they'd cast a passing glance at the piece itself-and who could blame them, I mean the pieces were hardly visually interesting, they were hardly arresting, they were hardly even beautiful-and then, having read the wall text they'd think I understand the piece completely, they'd nod their head, ah yes, this reptile terrarium filled with mercury is of course about the contamination of our oceans, as I've just learned on the wall text, and they'd check off a mental box, the artist had done what she'd promised, and they'd move on to the next one and do the same, and they'd leave the room feeling like they had gone and seen some culture that they had really understood for once, they'd understood the point the artist was trying to make because it was right there to read on the wall text, and of course it made sense. It was an idea, an idea about a world problem, about the artist's identity, and why couldn't everything be like this, they thought—why did the things they saw in the modern art museum have to make such little sense?'

One of the minor guests:

'I actually heard one of the guests—a conceptual artist who always had flowers in her hair and who I had always found incredibly stupid and annoying and, last I saw her, five years ago, was always bringing her baby to parties and art openings tied to her in an imperfectly dyed cotton sling, and she would tell people that she had brought the baby because indigenous mothers (indigenous to where, she never said) never parted from their babies for the first year, that the increased skin-to-skin contact taught the babies crucial self-nurturing skills for later in life, but really I'm not sure that a loft full of cigarette smoke and cocaine-fueled debates about post-internet aesthetics was what the indigenous mothers had in mind when they came up with this parenting style—I heard this conceptual artist, for once sans bébé, say to Nicole at the door when she'd arrived, she would have wanted us to have a nice time. She would have wanted us to celebrate the arts. It was nice there would be an actor coming because she would have wanted us to celebrate drama, she said to Nicole.'

One of the other guests, Alexander, an American author comes in for particular opprobrium. He is an author of novels of a certain type, having failed to have his far more interesting experimental first novel published, a man who refuses to read novels in translation. [I do worry this quote may though harm the book's Booker Prize chances given it features a judge!]:

'Alexander had talked freely about his first novel with me and with most anyone at the loft on the Bowery, elaborating on its literary interventions, its stylistic experiments, but after this book project was rejected by every major publisher, he rarely spoke again about what he was writing about, or even what he was thinking about, even after his next novel was widely celebrated as the new great thing, even as he was poised to become the new Franzen— an apt description I thought, because his writing was just as solipsistic, self-congratulatory, and mediocre as Franzen’s, although it was sexier, perhaps because Alexander had the experience of having once been a very good-looking man and Franzen had not. But even as Alexander’s debut novel, which was in fact his second though we weren’t allowed to mention that, was widely celebrated, he refused to discuss literature, or even ideas, beyond the fact that he had met Andrew Wylie for coffee or that he had sat next to Sarah Jessica Parker at the PEN/Faulkner Award or that he had gone with Ben Lerner to pick out a new armchair and wound up with this hideous brown chenille wing chair, he had said once when I went over to his apartment, if it weren’t for Ben Lerner I would have never bought this hideous wing chair.'

The wing-chair a nice nod to The Woodcutters. The narrator realises she should have realised Alexander's character from when she first met him (and I'm with her on this incredibly annoying habit of strangers) albeit as she admits there was some self-depreciating humounr in Alexander's approach to her at a gallery:

'It is only the worst people in the world who tell you that your shoelace is untied, the most intrusive, condescending people who let you know that your shoelace is untied. They have some kind of perverse desire to invade your personal space to inform you that you've been incapable of doing the simplest thing, and they alert you as though they are truly worried for your personal safety-that by leaving your shoe untied you are opening yourself up to the most severe bodily harm, and that they, by warning you of something that doubtlessly you're able to see, are absolute saints of the highest order, when in reality you've left your shoe untied because once it's dragged around on the dirty floor for long enough, you're well aware it's come undone but why on earth would you want to touch the muddy shoelace and tie it, and Alexander pointed at my shoelace, and as I was about to tell him that I knew my shoelace was untied, I looked down and noticed his shoelace was untied too.'

But there is, as mentioned some affection amongst the sarcasm, as she remembers her friends Rebecca, and while the party only confirms she was right to avoid these people for 5 years, her wishes towards them are mixed. As with the Woodcutters she is the last to leave the party, running down the stairs and through the city, but whereas Bernhard's narrator thinks I'll write something at once, no matter what -- I'll write about this artistic dinner, she attributes that sentiment to the author Alexander, and instead concludes:

'I wished for their removal from my life, and I wished a painful bout of syphilis for Eugene, I wished a catastrophic opening for Nicole, I wished for another tepidly reviewed book for Alexander, but I wished them all happiness and love.'

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

I love the concept behind this: a character returns to the home of the materialistic, pretentious, hollow ex-friends she used to admire years after she last saw them, now with a much more cynical and critical outlook.

The narration was so brutal and I loved how the entire story took place while the narrator was sitting on a sofa, just observing the people around her and reflecting on the past. The commentary on the art world and class, and the dismantling of the facades created by wealth and bravado, were so satisfying to read. Seeing the narrator's insight into all these characters made it feel as if you were getting to know them better than they knew themselves, and it was easy to share and delight in the narrator's cynicism, wit, and brutality. 

However, as much as I enjoyed the idea and thought it was well done, there was not enough content to cover almost 300 pages. A character sitting on a sofa and thinking about the people around her would be a wonderful, impactful 150-page novella but any longer than that and it just gets boring. There is no action until the very end, and even though the few glimpses we got into the past offered a different setting and some backstory, the bulk of this book is just character study after character study blended with criticisms of the bourgeois. It was great at first, but quickly became tiresome and drawn out. If it had been broken into smaller sections (this has no chapters or paragraphs), and maybe interspersed with more scenes from the past, it would have been incredibly effective and would have remained engaging and entertaining. But to be quite honest, by the time I reached the middle of the book I was no longer very invested. 

I loved the idea of this and really enjoyed it at first! But almost 300 pages of internal monologue just doesn't work in my opinion and it was tough to get through the second half. If you enjoy a more slow-paced story with a complete focus on characters rather than plot, this is an interesting and effective example of that. For me, it was just a little too overblown and unfortunately lost me somewhere along the way.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with this ARC in return for an honest review.