Happiness and Love

by Zoe Dubno

One of Vogue’s Best Books of 2025

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 piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.

Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor 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 perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. 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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Art, Humor, New York

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 22, 2025

Reviews

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

my two favorite things to read about...

but not my favorite way to read about them.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

this had a lot of interesting thoughts it said 900 times in between extremely uninteresting ones until even the interesting wasn't interesting anymore.

if i write the word interesting one more time it's not going to look like a word. interesting. see?

this is both my genuine thought and a test, because if i'm getting on your nerves you definitely won't be able to make it through this novel.

even a very small (and square, for some reason) book can manage to grind your gears without chapter or page or paragraph breaks.

this was trying very hard and sometimes succeeding, in between factual inaccuracies and minor errors and big stylistic swings that missed the mark.

i liked the dialogue at the end, then i didn't. i liked the ending, and then i REALLY didn't. i liked our protagonist in fits and starts. i couldn't decide whether this book was incisive and clever or just hateful and annoying.

maybe that last part at least was the point.

bottom line: this is a self-aware hard read — but that is still a hard read.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)

[MagretFume · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is absolutely brutal. 
All the narrative happens inside the protagonist head during a single night, as she attends a dîner party after her estranged friend's funeral. 
All her thoughts are pure vitriol. 

I loved the talent of the protagonist to dissect the worst flaws of the people around her, to the point of cruelty, and as her thoughts unravelled, her own hypocrisy became more and more difficult to stand. 

It is definitely a very original and impactful read. 
I think the writing is great. It is very raw, and has interesting even somehow funny moments but honestly it was a tough read and I'm glad it was short one, I'm not sure I could have stomach more of it.

[Zoe Dubno · Rating 5 out of 5]

my goodreads policy is to give every book 5 stars so i had to... give my own book 5 stars 🐒

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, or at least this 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.

Interview with the author: https://www.vogue.com/article/zoe-dub...

[Ceecee · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

The narrator, who is a writer, is finally back in New York, a city she has spent several years avoiding as well as the former friends that inhabit it. She has no plans to see anyone but one morning while pacing up and down the Bowery and surrounding streets, she bumps into Eugene. She doesn’t tell him she returned weeks ago, she doesn’t tell him she has no plans to reconnect with anyone from her old life, instead she tells him she’s only just returned. He invites her to attend a little dinner next evening to be held in honour of an actress she’s never heard of. He informs her of her friend Rebecca‘s death, a fact she already knows but gives him the satisfaction of being the one to break the awful news. Against her better judgement she accepts and on the night in question she watches all this arty crowd from the corner whilst systematically destroying them in her head. They all believe they’re clever and original thinkers, but they’re superior as well as stylish and artistic but with the benefit of the previous distance from them, she sees them for what they really are and berates herself for attending. Eventually, the “star of the show” arrives and we’re a hairs breath away from the wheels of the evening crashing off the tracks and reaching a finale of deliciously delivered truths, accompanied by a divine meal and fine wines.

This is not an easy read by any means as there are streams and streams of consciousness, no paragraphs, no chapters et cetera just pages and pages of internal thoughts which are often vicious and vitriolic but frequently entertaining. It’s very smart, astute and acutely observed and so I cannot deny that it is anything but very well written. It conveys her life, that of Rebecca, Eugene and his partner Nicole and writer Alexander in such a way that it enables us to see their lives for what they are as she destroys their pretensions and intellectual pretentiousness. In all honesty, I’m not sure at times exactly what the narrator is talking about but I definitely get the gist. However, it’s worth sticking with it for the take down which is incisive, cutting, destructive, brutal and bang on point. These are not likeable people and so richly deserve it! A round of applause please!

The ending is fantastic as she wishes all happiness and love with bouts of something else!! So good.

Apparently this is based on Thomas Bernhard’s The Woodcutter which is referenced several times but since I’ve not read it, it means nothing to me.

Overall, it’s very different and if you can get past the style it’s written in, it’s well worth reading.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Penguin Random House, Transworld/Doubleday for the much appreciated early copy in return for an honest review.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dubno's debut takes Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, published in 1984, into the contemporary world: Bernhard's novel is told by his alter ego who attends an "artistic dinner", sitting in a wing chair and sharing his stream-of-consciousness with us. The chamber play takes place at the abode of a Viennese couple enmeshed in the art world, and everyone is waiting for the star guest, an actor from the esteemed Burgtheater. Now Dubno's alter ego is in New York, sitting in the corner of a couch while attending a dinner party thrown by a couple enmeshed for the art world, people are waiting for the star guest, a Hollywood actor.

And very much like in the case of Bernhard, this text requires a reader who enjoys
a) a book with no plot that fully relies on observations
b) highly unsympathetic, self-assured ramblings about how everyone is horrible.
Sure, Dubno's text is social commentary on the contemporary New York art world. It's a Bowery apartment, the narrator just came back from a trip from Europe, the husband of the hosting couple is a visual artist infamous for stealing ideas, his wife's a curator, and there's an insufferable novelist roaming the party. Everything is overshadowed by the fact that before the party, many guests attended the funeral of a friend who had committed suicide.

The main point here (again: Bernhard created the blueprint) is that the people who deem themselves intellectuals and/or artists are just as tacky and lame as those they look down upon - and the unreliable narrator talks smack, but is still part of the crowd. The book focuses on witticisms and interpersonal dynamics that are steeped in jealousy, vanity, and fear, not on surprising takes and observations, and I have to say that I struggled to remain interested.

This text functions as a great conversation starter on the topic of how an original can and should relate to an homage: While the "Wuthering Heights" movie is a perverted version of the novel, this is way too close to Bernhard's seminal work, IMHO.

You can listen to the podcast gang discuss the German translation Nur das Allerbeste here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...

[Sunny Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The psychological horror of the nyc art world

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may not be a horror story, but its protagonist’s plight is certainly any introvert’s worst nightmare. Our narrator, a writer, is stuck at a dinner party that feels like it will never end, filled with the most insufferable people you can imagine. It’s hosted by old “friends” from New York’s art scene—friends she wishes she never reconnected with. One is Eugene, a middle-aged, nepo-baby artist whose love of creeping on younger women comes second only to his love of name-dropping. His partner, Nicole, is an insecure curator with family money who’s desperate to always be on the cutting edge. Amidst this off-putting scene, the narrator is mourning the very recent death of her friend Rebecca, ostensibly a friend of her fellow partygoers as well. Is she the only one actually grieving?

I loved this book. It is a dark comedy with a lot of heart and a biting wit. Our narrator is just sympathetic enough to feel like the friend you sit in the corner and gossip with at a party. She’s not a moralizer, she just straight up doesn’t like these people. But her moments of reflection on her friendship with Rebecca are emotionally resonant. I learned from the author’s note at the end that this is actually a retelling of Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, and now I’m dying to pick up that book too. If you’ve ever been at an event and thought “these are SO not my people,” you will find this novel deeply relatable.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me access to an eARC of this book!

[Katia N]

‘One cannot separate literature and life. If an age appears creatively, poetically, empty, it is fair to assume that life too had its emptiness, was carried on at a lower, less passionate level.’ wrote Graham Greene in his essay "Fielding and Sterne”. I am not sure it is entirely true. One would hope ‘emptiness’ or should we say ‘soullessness' of the present would make a creative person search for inspiration inside of his head, in a nature, history, or a fairytale at the end. However, this statement is probably closer to truth if the definition of literature is narrowed down to a genre of a realistic contemporary novel.

In this case, whatever one tries to do with the form an insipid content would sip through reflective not that much of the time but more so of the relevant social milieu. I guess this is partially the point of this retelling of Bernhard’s “Woodcutters” for the modern age. However, as much as the author tries to get her work close to the original in style and form, her effort, rather than being inspirational on its own, ends up a shallow imitation that predictably pales in the inevitable comparison. Maybe it is not her problem, but problem of our age. However, I suspect it is a bit more complicated than that. Typically for a millennial American novel, this retelling ends up being more about her protagonist (with a pronounced auto-fictional tilt). Respectively her characters take the role of a backdrop for her redemptive arc. This seems totally antithetical to the spirit of Bernhard’s original where he firmly empathises the irony of no redemption for his narrator.

For her novel, Dubno takes Bernhard’s plot and set of characters:

A writer returns to his native city, learns about the suicide of his long-abandoned friend and at the same time bumps into the other friend, a someone successful and powerful in creative circle who also used to know the dead friend. This man invites the writer to an “artistic’ dinner hosted by him and his wife where a famous actor would be the main guest. The scene is set and the rest of the novel (or actually both novels) is the writer sitting in the corner and observes a human zoo taking place in front of his/her eyes reflecting (ranting) about it and the people present and departed (the dead friend). The scene is expectedly disrupted by the arrival of the actor (actress in the case of the latter novel). Then the writer jumps into the night and feels happy to be alive.

Dubno swaps the gender of the main character; replaces Vienna with modern New York, and music scene with art. For the rest of the plot, the scene structure and the dynamics between the characters she follows Bernhard almost to the letter. Her resulting social critique of New York pseudo-artistic circles is sharp and occasionally interesting. One can see the contrast of time with Bernhard’s novel. He barely mentions money per se. While practically everything in the latter novel is driven by material gain. Dubno also tries to borrow his tone but somewhat less successfully. Her writer lacks irony and compensates for that with less sophisticated bitterness. For example, ‘the perfidious masturbators’ a vivid bernhardian metaphor for these people is replaced by less imaginative ‘the city's art-world corpses’ and soon. Using her our repetitions often enough, she has not quite managed to imitate the musicality of his prose, his rhythm. However, that was not the issue I’ve had with her novel. The writing was competent enough.

My problem was not the similarities, but the differences that she has either deliberately created or has just lacked skills to imitate close enough. The first ‘point of contention’ is the straightforward one: the book length. Bernhard has managed to pack it all in 180 pages; she tries to contain herself with 288. One cannot sustain the quality ‘rant (or should say ‘focus’) for so long. The nature of this style without paragraphs that it has to balance transgressions with keeping the reader’s constantly ‘on the ball’. It is achieved by constantly anchoring the narrative by periodically bringing it back to some detail that serves as a focus. Here it is a chair where the protagonist sits (the sofa in her case). But there should be a discipline in doing it. And the longer the narrative lasts the less effective this trick becomes. It seems by trying to add more ‘back stories’ than this style could sustain she has distorted this delicate balance. There was for example one story from the fashion world that was interesting but quite extraneous to the rest of the novel. The story does not seem to have a parallel in Bernhard’s novel. I suspect the author has created this brunch to share her personal experience. This just shows how difficult is to keep within the constraints if you take someone else prominent work as ‘format’.

Another small but significant difference is the time frame. Bernhardian narrator comes back to his city after 30 years of absence. So the whole epoch has changed. His commentary in this regard gives another dimension to the novel. This is impossible in Dubno’s book as her protagonist is absent just for five years. So we lose this dimension without gaining much.

All of this is ‘forgivable’. But I was more disappointed with what she was doing with the essence of Bernhard work. It seems that in the process of adapting his plot, she has lost all profundity, poignancy and ambiguity of his message. There is no baby left, only water. Her characters are shadows compared to pathetic tragedy of their Bernhard’s prototypes. The hosts here are talentless nepo-babies. In Bernhard’s novel they are people who have waisted their very tangible talents for nothing. They know it and it is too late to change anything. Or so they think so they keep going as of by inertia. This is an absurd and the tragedy. In Dubno’s version, her people do not have any talents, so noting to ‘waist’. They are simply non-entities with money and some influence in certain narrow circles. That is all. That is hardly interesting. Bernhard’s characters are real people he knew while Dubno went for the composites.That makes her task less controversial but creatively requires more skills that she seemingly didn’t quite master.

Even more frustrating was what she was doing with the character of her actress (the gender swap here again). The crescendo of Berhhard’s novel is the last scene when the actor temporarily shakes up the stasis of those people with some authenticity. With a pathos painful to observe he repeats that his dream is to become a simple woodcutter in a ‘virgin forest’. The irony is he knows he would never do it and at the morning he would come back to his acting. But even he himself sounds alarmed by his sincerity and the absurdity of it all. That was the actor. The equivalent “dream” in Dubno’s novel (if any) for the actress to swap her life for the life of a suburban housewife! That is hardly a crescendo in any sense as far as I am concerned. That hardly sounds outrageous just shallow and hypocritical. A drive for a wild nature has been replaced by the mundane suburbia as an artistic ambition and a dream? It left me confused as I expected the actress would be a kind of ineffectual wake up call her prototype served in the original. But here she is just one of those non-entities.So what was the point? I am not sure. Unless the point was to show how our main heroine has singularly outgrown all of this shallowness (not very difficult task based upon such a low bar as far as I am concerned). And surely she has done this in the book. But was this a Bernhardian enough move to take in a Bernhardian retelling? Or was it a kind of millennial Künstlerroman? Who knows.

I am afraid ranting for too long about a ‘ranting’ novel i might fall into the same trap making this boring. So I just finish with two sentences for comparison.(the long ones as it is always with Bernhard and his followers). Both sentences happen very close to the end. In case of Dubno, it is literally the last one.

Woodcutters:

I should have stayed in London at all costs, I told myself, and I kept on running in the direction of the Inner City, without knowing why, and I told myself that London had always brought me happiness and Vienna unhappiness, and I went on running, running, running, as though now, in the eighties, I was once more running away from the fifties, running into the eighties, the dangerous, benighted, mindless eighties, and again it struck me that instead of going to this tasteless artistic dinner I ought to have read my Gogol or my Pascal or my Montaigne, and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best people in the world: I hated them, yet found them somehow touching—I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching—I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them—I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it.

Happiness and Love:

...this meditation being one where I was meant to think happy thoughts about someone who I thought needed them, she told me to send good wishes with my mind, happiness and love, toward whomever I wanted to be happy, to allow the first person I thought of into my mind and wish happiness and love for them, and so without even hesitating I thought of Rebecca, who I hardly ever thought about and hadn’t spoken to for so long, but who I always wished happiness and love for because no one else needed so much love and lacked so much happiness, and I pictured Rebecca’s big almond eyes, her dark hair, and thought I wish you love, I wish you happiness, I wish you love, I wish you happiness and I remember that after an unknown period of time wishing happiness and love the yoga teacher told me to open my eyes and I discovered that I was weeping, that tears were rolling down my face and I was weeping like a child, I wasn’t even thinking of Rebecca anymore, I was just weeping thinking the phrase happiness and love, and I was absolutely horrified to see this guru with a satisfied little smile on her face, sure that she had enlightened me, but something truly changed within me hoping for happiness for Rebecca, and of course I had wished for happiness for Rebecca in the past, but the practice of sitting and begging the so-called universe to give it to her allowed something to change in myself, allowed me to understand that happiness was something that you sought yourself, something that the people around you could wish for you, that you could meet people, meet friends, for whom your CV, your qualifications, your money were less important than your desire for happiness and love, and so I ran down the Bowery, unburdened by all of them, and I thought happiness and love about Eugene, who was probably at this moment throwing up all over the young artist, I thought happiness and love about Nicole, who was likely micromanaging the cleaners in the great room of the loft in order to feel less alone while the man of the house was preoccupied, I thought happiness and love about Alexander, who was likely, like I was, rushing home to write about the evening in order to make sense of it all, and I wished them all a painless sleep, 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.

Note the difference in tone: Bernhard’s character has got a humility to acknowledge he is one of these people. He might be disgusted by this fact. He knows he is a hypocrite, but with all their failings and inadequacies, they are still ‘his’ people for better of worse. “I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them.” It is as if he is saying: ‘you, reader, if you are disgusted, try to do better in life and we will see about you.’ But he is accepting his feelings in all their contradictions.

Contrast it with Dubno’s girl who has made it all about herself at the end in a millennials’s tradition with mediation and redemption. Rebecca is a dead friend who presumably was still alive at the time of ‘mediation’. In both books the dead friend was abandoned by the protagonist as ‘hopeless’ case that cannot be helped. But Bernhard makes his narrator face the consequence of his choice (or the lack of it). While Dubno sends her character ‘meditate’ and weep crocodile tears in an yoga class. If she was that bothered, she should go and visit the girl or at least spare everyone of her ‘revelation’. And the rest of the passage (or a sentence?) can be summarised ‘I am so much better than all of you; i’ve grown through meditation; i am out of your playground and i wish you happiness, love and syphilis”.

I hope this shallowness and soullessness of the whole enterprise of this novel is deliberate. Maybe it is deliberate intention that i felt embarrassed for the shallowness of the whole set up but more so for the main character. And i felt bored: the feeling i have not experienced reading the original. I wonder why she decided to go for such a close retelling if her emphasis were so different from the original. What did she wanted her readers to see in those people in comparison with Bernhard? There is a scene in her book when the narrator contemplates about a modern artist making portraits of his clients in a style of the old masters. Those portraits were kitschy but made him famous and rich. After reading this novel i was left thinking: was this mentioning a very smart metafictional irony? It has worked brilliantly if it was the case.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published September 2, 2025.

3 stars

The unnamed narrator is a woman in her thirties, returned to NYC after some years of self-exile abroad. It’s not clear why she returned, but it is not because of the funeral which, in small part, makes up the subject of the novel which, along with the dinner party after comprises its whole - the entity takes place over a number of hours. During the dinner party the recalls the funeral of her former friend Rebecca, who committed suicide. Now she is grudgingly(?) attending a dinner party given by former friends Eugene and Nicole, with whom she once lived, in their beautiful, moneyed apartment in the Bowery. The dinner is not in honor of Rebecca however, but, rather, is a “cultural evening” given for an actress from California. Alexander, who is also there, who is always at their home, was once the center of her world along with Eugene, Nicole and Rebecca.

That group, along with others, believes they make up the young cultural elite of the city. They go to the important things, they make the things important by being there. The narrator was completely enmeshed in their world, left New York to escape them, but she never really has.

First off, be aware there are no paragraphs in this book, so if that is the sort of affectation that drives you crazy, well, you’ve been warned. Nearly everyone here is an awful person. Yes, pitiful in their way, but not so much that anything is excused. The men are worse than the women, which is a rather pitiful stab at feminism, I guess?

What if the narrator? She left, but her mind never left, and the author uses the actress to attack the group, not the narrator. They are “the ones who believe that their work is more important, more virtuous, different in its very nature to the work people actually enjoy.” I think there are probably groups of big city denizens who will love this book, but I just found it decent, somewhat tedious and repetitive at times.

[jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book would kill those booktok creators who claim they skip paragraphs that are too long and/or solely read a book’s dialogue.

“happiness and love” is an absolutely unflinching portrayal of the upper echelons of the (new york city) art scene with razor-sharp observations on the elitism, the social climbing, and the showmanship of it all. our unnamed narrator spends the 200+ pages of the novel revisiting her experiences surrounding those in the city’s art scene, after returning home to new york from europe to attend her friend’s funeral. while sitting on a sofa in her former patrons’ apartment for a “memorial service” that ends up being anything but, our narrator eviscerates the attendees and their true motives, coming to the realization of how performative those in her past life truly are.

as for its execution, this was difficult to read, and i mean that on a craft level. the entire novel is one continuous paragraph. no chapter breaks, no line breaks, no quotation marks (just italics for dialogue). it was claustrophobic and exhausting. on the one hand, i get it—the narrator is essentially rambling on and on about her experiences as she dissects the scene in front of her and her past, and the exhaustion the thick block of text creates is reflective of how the narrator is feeling. but it also just made it so unnecessarily difficult to read that it felt like a slog to get through at times. and as with all works that utilize the stream-of-consciousness style, some parts would flow well and others would stall. granted, i did find that i found a rhythm around the 55% mark, but i shouldn’t have to force myself through half of a novel to, only then, find my footing with the prose.

my favorite parts were when the narrator reflected on rebecca and her personal experiences with her; and, unfortunately, these bits were outweighed by the class analyses. the narrator continuously brings up how distasteful it is to center a dinner party around an actress’s expected presence while framing it as a memorial service for the deceased rebecca, but most of the novel was a rambling critique of her peers, and rebecca’s person/character fell through the cracks. i always like to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like this, but it almost felt like dubno was trying to balance the two—the narrator’s grief over rebecca’s death and her disdain for the world her and rebecca took part in—but it became less and less rebecca-focused as the book went on, despite rebecca being the catalyst for the narrator’s return to new york in the first place. the narrator also repeatedly points out the issues with the bourgeoisie, but at the same time i don’t think she’s necessarily exempt from that. she does everything she can to separate herself from *them* when, in reality, she lets herself be repeatedly sucked into their world and their lives, as if she has no agency of her own.

it was also really fun to read the actress, who was invited to the memorial-not-memorial as the focal point of the evening, completely annihilate all the attendees. she was a powerhouse! lastly, i appreciated the optimism and the overall sentiment of the ending of the novel, but it felt like a very quick switch from the heaviness that hung within the other 95% of the narrative.

despite some great moments of awareness and eloquent critiques on the rich and the “cultured”, i expected to enjoy this more than i did. while i understand its intention, i think the ~internal monologue with no room for pause~ format really detracted from my reading experience, while still being able to acknowledge what that style was attempting to achieve in the process.

2.5

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

[twoey (rachel q.) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly think this has become a new favorite book of mine. There’s nothing I love more than books that dress down pseudo-intellectual rich people, and this one absolutely delivered. I once again think of the Virginia Woolf quote about how people read fiction like it’s gossip- this book absolutely fits that description.

At first I didn’t know what to make of the structure of the prose, as it is all one continuous paragraph and uses run-on sentences. However, rather than feeling sloppy, this style of writing really allows you to sink deeply into it and take it all in as it bombards you with absolute insanity.

A very fun read, I’d recommend it to anyone who has been a part of the art world in any capacity.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Amy McEwan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just a woman ranting about the bourgeois.

[Celine Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

really, really loved this and Dubno ventriloquizes Thomas Bernhard’s voice so well! (it’s explicitly inspired by Bernhard’s Woodcutters)

the searing cynicism and disgust with the superficialities of society, of course—but she also gets at the genuine humanism (and the sincere belief in art and love!!) that, to me, is covertly the best part of Bernhard

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

read Bernhard’s Woodcutters first, as this is in conversation with that work!

&, this is SO VERY GOOD!!
_______

from Paul’s review (but it goes much more in depth with comparisons & more, so please check it out too!)

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, or at least this 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.'

[remarkably · Rating 2 out of 5]

solid and fine, but with the form of the 'highbrow' and not the ineffable spirit. overtly (author's note) intended to be a take on thomas bernhard's woodcutters and very transparently so throughout, which always leaves me with the feeling, well, why not read thomas bernhard's woodcutters, and I think the major deviations (e.g. saturation with pop-culture-speak, the introduction of a sugary ending note) are not for the best. dubno is of course correct to see a kind of implicit optimism in bernhard, which she writes in her afterword — but I think she is wildly incorrect in believing that making that optimism more explicit and overt represents any kind of advance resp. the original. other than that a basically enjoyable hour of my life. whips along nicely, some good or perhaps even very good character psychology, middling use of language that excited no particular feeling in me, skewering of art-world types which was accurate and sharp but not exactly funny. I was also rather sniped by the line editing, which I know it is a little churlish to get too worked up about, but I can't read things like ‘my face of approbation softened into a smile’ without becoming somewhat aggrieved

[Ed Curtin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book! Biting, witty, and fun. I also hate speaking to artists. She’s just like me fr

[Ava · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most writers suck. Zoe Dubno does not. Her short fiction and essays are pretty good. But trying to make Thomas Bernhard contemporary was a waste. (This book is an homage (?) to The Woodcutters with the same premise, climax, and worst of all - style.)

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

in the words of lorde… what was that

[Ciara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unquestionably the best book I’ve read all year. If I’m being honest, I think a lot of the negative ARC reviews are from readers who were never the intended audience for this book. I’ve known every single one of these characters and I’ve been trapped, narrating elaborate thoughts to myself in my head, in social settings just like this.

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ambitious, stream-of-consciousness debut, Happiness and Love updates Bernhard's Woodcutters for the modern age, in which the self-proclaimed cultural elite are primarily successful in fulfilling their own egoistic need for indulgence.

Our narrator finds herself at an excruciating dinner party with these former friends, with the entire duration of the novel taking place in a single scene. It is clear our narrator herself has a distaste for the general milieu but is still working out the specificities of her own thought as we trace some of the contradictions and development of her internal, misanthropic reflections. The narrator is worthy of criticism herself, as her critical distance from these insufferable bourgeois "intellectuals" grants her a moral superiority in condemning theirs. Hardly different, no?

This was witty, cutting, reflective, and overwhelmingly fun.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the e-arc.

[Niamh McCann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't even really know how I feel about this but I will say - if you can, read it in one sitting. I feel like this book has so so much potential, but something was lacking. I also felt that the ending was disconnected from the rest of the story and wasn't a good fit for me as the reader; it didn't do what it thought it was doing. I really enjoyed the way in which this was written over the course of one evening, it felt like an expansion of lots of little thoughts we can have in a minute amount of time, expanded out to tell our mc's story. I thought it was quite insightful, funny and thoughtful - if a little overdone on the criticism of rich people which I maybe could have read less of. And I was unsure at the beginning, but I really grew to like the use of italicisation throughout. The sarcasm was dripping off the page.

Thank you to the publisher for this ARC!

[Sam Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s one long cultural dinner party for artists.

Several months after our unnamed main character moves back to New York, she learns of Rebecca’s death at 30. Ten years Rebecca’s junior, our main narrator loses touch with Rebecca for 5 years. Last she heard, Rebecca still craved fame, working as an actress and director. She took prescription painkillers for her depression, and the cocktail of drugs would eventually kill her. Before the two women shifted from close friends to strangers, though, the MC had not moved from The City yet. Their relationship evolves when the MC grows closer to Nicole and Eugene, a wealthy couple who protect their high-brow clout in the art world. At 19, eager, naive, and excited to become a writer, the MC becomes their protégé and protectee. The symbiotic relationship—she, amusement; they, benefactors—exists until the MC sees through their bizarre approach to creating and gatekeeping culture. When she extricates herself from their toxic ensnarement, she and Rebecca have already drifted; the MC learns from her new Bohemian friends to look down on Rebecca’s anxiety for fame and her lack of success in creating art.

Although she has no interest to socialize with Nicole, Eugene, and the other avant garde-ers, she emerges from the woodwork to honor Rebecca at the memorial service. The story, then, is her first-person telling of her experience with and assessment of N and E’s tutelage and her transformed philosophy of art and culture. Dubno’s debut reminds me of Bosker’s journalistic endeavors in Get The Picture as she investigates how some American artists participate in their cultural sphere. In Dubno’s fictitious work, the MC critiques the “criteria for . . . membership” into the cultural community. A famous actor at the dinner party also delivers monologues, offering her criticism of the artists in her company’s self-importance. She announces, “I’ve gleaned, you guys in the art world need to elevate everything to make it feel worthwhile. Why not just admit to enjoying a beautiful object, instead of finding the need to justify it to yourself by discussing it in unintelligible language that doesn’t describe why you like it?”

I generally don’t mind a sarcastic narrator who brings a mood of transcendent judgment. Perhaps the contrast from young and ignorant to grown and intelligent seems unpalatable. The contrast is fine as such, but the mode of “everyone is asinine except the transcended few” might seem unbelievable to me because I don’t work in the world of art (and, by and large, the spirit in my field is unlike what Dubno details here). In sum, I understand the author’s questioning of the philosophy of artists—I’ll always remember Makoto Fujimura telling me not to let art intimidate but heal. However, I hoped the narrator’s glum and bitter voice would even out before she reaches another moment of enlightenment, drunk after the party, manifesting happiness and love to others.

Dubno includes a note at the end of the novel and explains her inspiration behind using “Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel, Holzfällen, translated into English as Woodcutters.”

My thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for an ARC.

[Crys Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure how this would go because I find misanthropic complaining exceedingly tiresome, but the book is a banger. Like any millennial I write lol all the time, but rarely in fact lol. I laughed out loud numerous times reading this. I woke my partner up far before his alarm to read him the “I am a pisser, I am a pooper” section. After I read one paragraph to him he laughed with me, but he also said it reminded him of Bernhard, so Dubno did the thing here, whether you like Bernhard or not.

Also, I adopted a semi-feral cat and decided to read aloud to him as voice exposure therapy, and because this is what I was reading this is what he got. You will be happy to hear that the cat is no longer afraid of my voice, but also the repetition of phrases and emphasis that wasn’t doing much for me reading silently lends a rhythm to the prose that really won me over. It is weirdly…lyrical somehow. Read some 20 pages aloud and then even if you go back to reading silently the rhythm will be easier to access. 10/10

[Lucy Shichman · Rating 3 out of 5]

this whole book felt like reddit snark. the author did a great job of making me hate everyone. i felt sooooo vindicated when the actress finally tells them all off. i’m so glad the art world that i personally reside in is full of unpretentious and really thoughtful friends and not insane and annoying snobs.

this book was written with no paragraph breaks and no chapter breaks and no quotation marks, just one long continuous wall of text. kept getting lost on the page without any of the usual anchors, had to focus up to finish it!

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unnamed narrator has returned from London to New York after many years away. She's unhappy to be back and desperate to stay tucked away from the acquaintances she had when she lived in New York previously. However, after learning of her friend Rebecca's death, she bumps into an old friend, Eugene, and is invited to a dinner party that will honor a famous actress. (And, of course honoring Rebecca. But only performatively).
And that is what this book highlights. The performative nature of grieving, living, existing.

As the narrator sits in a corner sofa awaiting the arrival of the very late guest of honor, she analyzing the other guests, What follows is a stream of consciousness about the pretensions of the artworld, artists, and how they value their own intellect, wealth, and achievement over the value of their art.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[City Elf Reader (Ryan) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story takes place over a dinner party full of art world and cultural “elites.” Our narrator sits in the corner with a fake smile (when she can bear it) and performs a mental take down of each and every guest with an obsessive fervor.

Unfortunately, this just wasn’t the book for me. It is essentially just someone being a hater for about 210 pages, with a good ending that comes too late in the story. While it was funny and interesting for the first 40 or so pages, I reached my limit on how much complaining I could take. It became boring and uninteresting to me.

Based on merit, It is well written and I did like the ending. The seething sarcasm and distain jumped off the page. The characters felt very real. My partner is in the art world and this book does a good job of characterizing the very real and very detestable personalities that permeate that space.

I don’t think being a hater is cool, fun, or interesting, even if I do think think the pseudo-Intellectual, pretentious, and privileged former friend group of our narrator deserve her, let’s say, astute observations.

It’s like…. Ok now what? The “what” doesn’t come until the last 5 or so pages and by then who cares.

Thank you Scribner for the ARC

[Hayley Groom · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books where I see a lot of people rating 4-5 stars and I feel like I am missing something.

My brain really struggled to even get around reading this on an e-reader as there were no breaks or paragraphs. My eyes would swim across the page and I ended up re-reading something or find I’d jumped to a different place.

While this was witty and sarcastically funny in places, ultimately I just found it incredibly boring.

My honest reaction: Girl, protect your energy and just leave if you hate everyone so much.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

2/5 stars ⭐️

[Rachel Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 perhaps??

Yeah, so I stand by my update about 75% through the novel--it's basically 200 pages of main character talking mad trash on some seriously pretentious pricks. Then another baddie comes in with fire and a mic drop.

The no chapter, no paragraph, no break format took getting used to...can't say it grew on me. It felt a bit meandering and I struggled with the writing style.

But overall? Who doesn't love to see an asshole getting taken down a couple notches? This was jolly good fun!

[Ice Magrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of utter brilliance. It's astute, charming, witty, wry, propulsive—every single thing I could ask for—and all the other compliments in the English language.