Zoe Dubno’s new novel is a searing takedown of New York’s art scene

On a pristine white linen sofa, in a modish loft apartment on the Bowery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sits the narrator of Zoe Dubno’s stylishly savage debut Happiness and Love. Clutching a glass of wine, from her vantage point she observes a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole, a photographer-curator power couple, for the great and the good of New York’s art world.

But they are neither great nor good in the scathing opinion of the unnamed narrator. These people were once her friends, but now she sees a room full of raging egomaniacs and pseuds and she cannot bear them. It is the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend Rebecca, who never quite made it as an actress, but the fickle attention of the set has already moved on and this party is being thrown not as a wake, but for a new guest, an up-and-coming actress who is yet to arrive. As she waits, the narrator recalls her history with these excruciating people who she claims to despise, yet seems somehow powerless to move on from.

Happiness and Love unfolds over a tight 267 pages, in one continuous paragraph with no chapters or line breaks. When Dubno speaks to me over video call from her home in New York City, she explains that the novel takes its form – and more – from Holzfällen (originally published in 1984, later translated into English as Woodcutters), by the feted Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. Reading it for the first time, around five years ago, was a formative experience: “I was genuinely shocked, both that it was a novel written in the ’80s, because I thought it was so current, but also I thought it was so timeless, a book [that] should be older than it is.”

Holzfällen, a roman-á-clef that got its author into a bit of bother – he was sued for libel by the central couple the book is based on, Dubno tells me – also provided the “skeleton” for Happiness and Love. “I read Woodcutters and I thought: ‘Now, that is how to get all the stuff I want to get in a book, in a book.’” She likes the term “literary fan fiction” à la Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, based on Howards End by EM Forster.

“In [Bernhard’s] book, it’s similarly a dinner party full of cultural elites in Austria and it all takes place over that one evening.” Dubno transplanted Bernhard’s aristocratic Viennese dinner table to present-day Manhattan and filled it with her own 21st-century elites: from wealthy curator Nicole, who, Dubno writes, “did nothing, nothing but walk from studio visit to studio visit buying artists lunch and buying artists’ work and trying to buy herself the feeling of satisfaction that comes from actually doing something” to an arrogant novelist named Alexander, who not only insisted on reading his own, very long, poem at Rebecca’s funeral, but followed it with a recitation of his own CV, the narrator observes, witheringly.

I think it’s also about feeling really lonely, it’s a book about feeling really lonely with dashed hopes for what it could mean to live a cultural life.

The contemporary art world – rather than art itself – comes under scrutiny in Happiness and Love, and I wonder what drew her to it. “I don’t think that there are very many places on Earth where you can go into a room and there are some of the wealthiest people on the planet and some of the people who have absolutely nothing, are sleeping in an apartment with seven other people. And they’re all welcome. Everybody is getting something out of somebody else. The entire thing is transactional,” says Dubno. She observed this world at close quarters, through the artist friends she made at college, first as an undergraduate at Oberlin College in Ohio and at Rutgers University, Newark, where she studied for an MFA. Plus, of course, “the art world has great parties”. Not that the narrator, who is a writer, is drawn from life: “Yeah, it’s not me. Personally, I don’t think I could endure some of the stuff the narrator endures. I would say those things out loud.”

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