Name: Happiness and Love
ISBN: 9781668062951

Zoe Dubno

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.

Happiness and Love

saw a page of this on maggie zhuphilia's tweets once upon a time and was inspired enough to put it on my tbr. that seems like it was the only compelling page . apparently supposed to be a modern take on bernhard's woodcutters except i've never read that so i couldn't actually tell you but the complaining and weeping and whining while participating in the society is certainty present still. writing a satire is always hard and while parts of this made me go mmmm yes the other part of me was like damn girl just leave this sounds like a you problem. also was written with zero paragraph breaks or chapter so felt like a two hour trauma vent with [redacted] and was just a Lot emotionally. the characters dubno writes are certainly compelling enough to hate but only on the surface because our main character and dubno don't find an interiority within them to dive deeper which makes the social commentary that much weaker. 

read on a camping trip. 

saw a page of this on maggie zhuphilia's tweets once upon a time and was inspired enough to put it on my tbr. that seems like it was the only compelling page . apparently supposed to be a modern take on bernhard's woodcutters except i've never read that so i couldn't actually tell you but the complaining and weeping and whining while participating in the society is certainty present still. writing a satire is always hard and while parts of this made me go mmmm yes the other part of me was like damn girl just leave this sounds like a you problem. also was written with zero paragraph breaks or chapter so felt like a two hour trauma vent with [redacted] and was just a Lot emotionally. the characters dubno writes are certainly compelling enough to hate but only on the surface because our main character and dubno don't find an interiority within them to dive deeper which makes the social commentary that much weaker. 

I spent the first half of this trying to figure out if I was supposed to find the protagonist as insufferable as I did, or if I was supposed to be thinking "you're so right girl!!!" And sure, it's probably a bit of both. But the book is not as smart or as funny as it thinks it is, and it is so, so repetitive, that i just ceased to care. Like, good job, you made a book eviscerating the easiest group on the planet to eviscerate -- shitty, self important art world people that everyone already hates. Cool? How brave?? She's a good enough writer and some of the stuff about art at the end is interesting, but the tongue and cheek catharsis bit she went for fell flat. The whole thing feels like it's designed so people who live* in the art world can read this and think "this is so me! I'm in on the joke about all this too haha everyone's so self important! thank god im a little less insufferable than they are!" Just like, go be alone and stop thinking about yourself for a while. None of this matters.

*I refuse to say "work" bc the perspective of this is so jobless, and while I know thats part of the point I'm just fundamentally uninterested in that. Give me the perspective of the caterers working the party who want to be artists, give me the intern who spends 6 straight hours printing the same five place cards over and over again on a printer from 2004 because someones assistant thought they "just didn't look right"! That is an interesting perspective of the NYC culture scene, not this shit. 

Regan Martin

I spent the first half of this trying to figure out if I was supposed to find the protagonist as insufferable as I did, or if I was supposed to be thinking "you're so right girl!!!" And sure, it's probably a bit of both. But the book is not as smart or as funny as it thinks it is, and it is so, so repetitive, that i just ceased to care. Like, good job, you made a book eviscerating the easiest group on the planet to eviscerate -- shitty, self important art world people that everyone already hates. Cool? How brave?? She's a good enough writer and some of the stuff about art at the end is interesting, but the tongue and cheek catharsis bit she went for fell flat. The whole thing feels like it's designed so people who live* in the art world can read this and think "this is so me! I'm in on the joke about all this too haha everyone's so self important! thank god im a little less insufferable than they are!" Just like, go be alone and stop thinking about yourself for a while. None of this matters.

*I refuse to say "work" bc the perspective of this is so jobless, and while I know thats part of the point I'm just fundamentally uninterested in that. Give me the perspective of the caterers working the party who want to be artists, give me the intern who spends 6 straight hours printing the same five place cards over and over again on a printer from 2004 because someones assistant thought they "just didn't look right"! That is an interesting perspective of the NYC culture scene, not this shit. 

Happiness and Love

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