At the beginning of Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, we find ourselves at a Downtown Manhattan dinner party. Anticipation hangs in the air as a group of young creative types waits for a buzzy young actress to arrive. The narrator, we learn, has ended up here surrounded by a group of old friends she’s purposefully avoided since moving out of the city five years ago; after returning for the funeral of a friend within this same circle, she finds all her old gripes and resentments with them surfacing again, watching them perform their acts of faux modesty and subtle games of oneupmanship against each other. The narrator sits on a sofa in the corner of the room, sipping white wine, and we hear every scathing thought that passes through her head—and continue to do so for the following 224 pages, over criss-crossing timelines. Inspired in part by the vitriolic stream of consciousness that makes up German novelist Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 social satire Woodcutters—but with the preening intellectuals of Vienna’s bourgeois transposed to a Dimes Square-adjacent young arts scene in New York—Dubno’s novel is as lacerating as it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Partly because of that, Happiness and Love has already caused a bit of a stir—there’s a sense of recognition anyone who has orbited a similar creative milieu (and their pretensions) will feel when reading it. It’s a world that Dubno, who was raised on the Upper West Side and attended Oberlin College, is closely familiar with—even if she fiercely maintains it wasn’t based on any specific group of people, and certainly not a specific dinner party. (As a culture, fashion, and lifestyle journalist, Dubno has previously written for the New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue.) “I’ve had many people ask me, ‘Did you really go to a dinner party like that?’ No, of course not! That dinner party is a nightmare. I would never be invited to that because I’m a bitch,” she says, laughing. “I would have spoken my mind.”
It’s also—at least at points—a book about fashion, and not just in the withering takedowns of a friend who wears a “ridiculous black Margiela mourning costume” to the funeral, or the satirical portrait of a middle-aged Marxist fashion editor who briefly takes the narrator under her wing, or how it dissects these artists and filmmakers’ willingness to take money from the fashion world while simultaneously turning their noses up at it. (It helps that Dubno clearly understands this world and also cuts a stylish figure herself, appearing in the images supplied for this story wearing Grey’s, a cult New York label whose discreet, palpably luxurious clothes speak to fans of The Row and Lemaire.) It’s a book that is more concerned with the bigger picture stuff that fashion so often speaks to, even if many of its haughty characters would rather die than admit it: the delicate and ever-shifting balance of conformity and individuality in how we present ourselves to the world, say; or how the internet age has flattened the cultural landscape, turning every artist, thinker, or reference from across the centuries into a kind of commodity that can be used to construct a “personal brand.” Combined with Dubno’s lavish, compulsively readable prose—written as one long, relentless paragraph and with a liberal use of italics to signal her disdain for this world that she can’t seem to quit—it makes for one of the year’s most exhilarating debuts.
Here, Dubno talks to Vogue about navigating the intensity of some readers’ response to her book, how humor became her secret weapon when writing, and why she plans to move away from the distinctive style of Happiness and Love for her next project.
