In the pursuit of joy and companionship, one must suffer the fact that most people—on any given day, evening, or event—are very annoying, and some, near intolerable. These people are everywhere: your grocery store, your favorite bar, your daily walking route, crying in the audience at your wedding, crying over your coffin at your funeral. 

In Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love from Scribner, an unnamed narrator confronts such unbearable individuals, those who were once members of her close circle, at a dinner party after her best friend’s funeral. In the story, she sits in the corner of a sofa, recounting the memories and missteps made by her friends and herself, while everyone awaits for a very late actress to arrive in order for their meal to commence. 

Happiness and Love, inspired in part by Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters, is a funny, witty, stream-of-consciousness style tease on the modern, intricate manufacturings of the upper class and the art world. 

Throughout, the narrator accuses her hosts, a curator-artist couple named Nicole and Eugene, of poserdom. The accusations see Nicole (and her exhibitions) as an “intellectual bottom feeder, trawling the ocean floor to scavenge ideas…that had been chewed over by so many idiots that they’d become totally meaningless,” and Eugene (and his art) of “being both talentless and wise…the ruin of his soul, his flight toward alcoholism and drug abuse…all made possible only because of his excellent taste and his knowledge that he does not have the ability or the genius to create anything interesting.” 

Nonetheless, Nicole and Eugene are well known in New York’s elite art scene, more acclaimed for knowing (or owning) what’s considered artistic, rather than contributing to art itself. This might feel unique to our contemporary situation, one where who you know or what you have indicates success more than having a skill that could actually make one successful. Dubno is reminded of something actress and writer Cookie Mueller once wrote: ‘“Never in history have so many people been so famous for doing so little.’ And she wrote that in the 70s,” she remarks. 

Dubno explains that Happiness and Love was born out of conversations between herself and John Keene, her MFA advisor at Rutgers. “He kept sending me these articles about various young people who we were supposed to think were amazing, and doing really interesting things,” she says, “and he would say, ‘Do you know this person? Are they really cool?’ And I would be like, ‘Ugh, no, I don’t know that person, but apparently…’ And then I’d go on a rant that really resembles the book.”

And while the narrator explains in great detail all the wrongdoings of her fellow dinner party attendees, there comes a certain point where readers may question why this character is staying so long at an evening they hate so much. “I think I have less patience than the narrator and a little bit of a better bullshit detector than the narrator,” says Dubno. “I think if you’re really insecure, you can’t believe that anybody is doing anything actually interesting because you have this thought that deep down, you’re not that interesting. I feel like, right now, there’s kind of a wave of being a little bit more positive of being like, ‘Maybe that is kind of nice that they’re doing that’ [or] ‘That’s a cute little thing they’re doing.’ If you’re ever around an old artist who’s been around for a long time, they’re so positive about what everybody’s doing. They just love to see that it’s good, [that] you care, like, ‘This is fun.’”

Perhaps that is the secret! To joy, to compassion, to setting oneself free from the critic’s position, which in the end, harms the critic the most. “Carrying around that weight of hating people is, for the narrator at least, kind of ruining their life,” says Dubno. “Once she can accept that these people have no power over her, she is able to say, ‘Hmm, I hope that maybe you get well,’ and ‘I hope that maybe you have a nice life, because I don’t care anymore.’” She continues, “In the broader sense, it’s hard to just turn the other cheek—generally as the political situation is—but in intersocial relationships, I think it’s really important to just say, ‘Oh, I don’t need to be hating you anymore.’” 

Styled by Rachel Davis at One Represents

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Makeup: Marisol Steward

Hair: Darren Agyei-Dua

Photo Assistant: Olivia Nacht

Location: Marriott London County Hall