Happiness and Love
A Novel
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
One of Vogue’s Best Books of the Year
“Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people’s idiocies. There’s something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield about the narrator…it possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge.” —The Spectator
Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love is a “deliciously scathing” (Vogue UK) debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.
From her perch on the corner of a white sofa, in the beautiful apartment of terrible people, our narrator watches the assembled group of artists, writers, and hangers-on and silently, mercilessly eviscerates them in a “nervy and blisteringly funny” (The Wall Street Journal) monologue.
“Told in a single long, savage and hilarious paragraph,” this is a novel that can be read “in one delicious go” (Financial Times): the story of an evening that slowly self-destructs, as the guests sip orange wine and await the arrival of a newly famous actress. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young and jaded writer skewers her fellow guests at a decadent dinner party in this sharp and satirical debut from Dubno. The unnamed narrator is back in New York City after spending five years in Europe, where she'd moved after growing tired of her status-obsessed friends. She's stopped on the street by one of them, an artist named Eugene who steals other people's ideas. He invites her to dinner in his palatial loft on the Bowery, which he shares with his curator wife. A coterie of young creatives gather at the loft, a "cathedral of modernist rococo," where Eugene's drunken chauvinism emboldens Alexander, a virtue-signaling fake-feminist novelist, to spar with the guest of honor, a Hollywood ingenue, over her director's sexist gender politics. The recent death of the group's mutual friend—a tender-hearted "almost-actress"—looms over the evening, evoking Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters. Dubno updates Bernhard's drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary ("beluga caviar on marcelled potato chips, the kitsch, appetizing specialty de la maison of marrying high and low"). Just as the narrator's excoriation begins to wear thin, she breaks the tension with wry self-deprecation on her "sybarite" self. Readers will devour this in one gulp. Agents: Mollie Glick and Julie Flanagan, CAA.
