In Zoe Dubno's dark and entertainingly splenetic debut novel, Happiness & Love, a nameless narrator spends the length of a dinner party mentally eviscerating her hosts and others who are part of a rarefied world of art, affluence, and narcissism.
The novel opens where it remains: at the Manhattan loft of a wealthy, artistic couple. The narrator, who once lived with the couple, is a writer who learned a few days earlier of the drug-overdose death of a mutual friend: "Each and every person at the dinner had been at Rebecca's funeral that day. And yet this was not a dinner in her honor." The party's guest of honor is an actress whose arrival everyone spends the book's first half anticipating. During this time, the narrator evaluates her company, whom she regards as corrosive enough to have driven her to spend the previous five years abroad.
Happiness & Love has no chapters or paragraph breaks; it's one continuous skein of invective. (In an afterword, Dubno says the book is loosely based on Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's 1984 novel, Woodcutters.) As the narrator mentally throws her barbs, many hilarious and most in the direction of her hosts (one is "a self-involved predacious remora"), readers will gradually come to understand that Happiness & Love is a grief novel spiked with guilt. In one of her rare guileless moments, the narrator notes that, "had I not abandoned Rebecca, had I not condemned her for her weakness, she may have been here at the Bowery tonight instead of me." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer