The word “stupid” appears 20 times in Happiness & Love, Zoe Dubno’s book of art world satire. The novel, though recently published, is not exactly new: It is more than loosely based on Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters, borrowing its structure, scenes, and even some sentences. Plus, its observations about the art world’s hypocrisies and vanities will hardly appear groundbreaking to anyone who has dipped a toe in the scene, or consumed similar parodies, like Ben Lerner’s book 10:04 or Ruben Östlund’s film The Square.
Dubno’s unnamed narrator keeps using the word “stupid,” that snippy little adjective, to describe everyone around her, though she repeats the word to no one in particular, as she has no real friends. Instead, she spends her time with people she dislikes, or else alone, on a white linen couch, drinking natural wine and making flat-footed complaints. Her peers, she moans, are all vapid, social climbing alcoholics—the pot all too obviously calling the kettle black.
Time and again, the narrator turns up her nose at the downtown New York scene’s apparent disinterest in meaning and beauty, using art only to chase wealth and clout. Contradictions abound, and she relishes pointing them all out: a self-proclaimed Marxist runs a fashion magazine, accepting bags as bribes and joking—or simply stating—that she has swapped “dialectical materialism for straight materialism.” A wealthy couple lets her and other creatives crash rent-free in their Bowery loft and Rhinebeck getaway, only to demand attention and steal ideas from their poorer friends. They boast shelves full of theory books, with spines evidently uncracked.
Her critiques of the creative class are accurate—so accurate as to be obvious and boring. But what makes the novel so grating is less its content than its form. Traditionally, novels tell a story by showing instead of telling: They capture the texture of a milieu rather than making blunt declarations about it. Instead, Dubno’s entire book is literally just the narrator complaining, without so much as a paragraph break or quotation mark. Tonally, it’s like a Yelp review of Dimes Square types, the rant edited to read semi-smooth.
Dubno is herself a Dimes Square–adjacent magazine writer, and her whiny narrator laments having to “debase” herself by listening to podcasts and writing fashion features instead of real literature. Dubno, meanwhile, spends her debut novel opportunity to pen what is essentially a lifestyle story, but mean. In response, the book has mostly garnered the kind of breezy “literary it girl” pieces that don’t require journalists to read the book, with New York Magazine foregrounding the “fugue state” Dubno enters while eating “Sauerkraut soup.” This is the exact kind of coverage the novel decries, and I can’t decide whether the response feels like karma or simply like the plan all along.
The book’s narrator herself would cringe over these responses, as she does over most things. She’s the kind of uptight, disgruntled person who speaks of sex only with disgust, and who abandons friends in need when they cease to serve her. She deems her friend Rebecca’s mental breakdown, upon exiting an abusive relationship, “a desperate plea for attention,” then abandons her because of it. When Rebecca dies—by an overdose either accidental or intentional—the narrator’s sympathies hardly change; she resorts mostly to judging others’ grief, complaining that everyone thinks themselves chic for mourning a downtown micro-celebrity, as if she had been much of a real friend to the deceased.
When the narrator skewers a nepo baby, an artist-slash-fashion-photographer, for ripping off conceptual artworks and stripping them of all their “revolutionary” aspects, she devotes only half a sentence to the story. Even if I were kvetching with friends, I’d want more detail than this, as an adult interested in coming to my own conclusions. If you’re going call an artwork “revolutionary,” for the love of god, back it up by saying how! It’s one-note moments like this support the Baffler’s description of novel: “the Temu version of Woodcutters, cringingly imitative but in all areas wanting.”
The narrator regularly bemoans the fact that others use her, yet she also drones on endlessly about resentfully putting up with moral dubiousness for scenesters’ money and connections. Dubno’s narrator doesn’t see the hypocrisy, but surely the writer must? I kept reading and waiting for the story to build and evolve, assuming all the hypocrisy had to have some kind of meta-point. But it stubbornly stayed in the register of crabby complaints. Near the end, in what passes as a moment of self-reflection but stops short of self-responsibility, she blames downtown denizens for making her just like them. Then there’s the unsatisfying punchline.
At the end of the book, a yoga teacher with “a strange Balkan accent” suggests the narrator try closing her eyes and imagine herself wishing those around her “happiness and love.” Our protagonist cries, and starts thinking of all the characters she has spent the book lampooning. She wishes the fuckboy nepo baby happiness and love, but also “a painful bout of syphilis.” She wishes happiness and love for an editor friend she felt exploited her, but also “another tepidly reviewed book,” clearly not understanding the assignment.
I realize I probably sound just like the narrator, complaining about her vapid grievances, longing for actual art. Indeed, Dubno’s titular phrase—“happiness and love”— is so cheesy and blunt that it’s hard not to roll your eyes, thereby becoming a judgmental killjoy just like the narrator herself. The writer knows that gossipy takedowns get read more than literature, that many of us will hate-read a book about Dimes Square despite our better judgment. It’s just that the Warholian, PoMo move of doing the thing you’re critiquing, but doing it ironically, is almost always a cop-out that’s by now passé.
It’s harder—and braver—to imagine a different world than it is to sneer at the present one. Dubno’s narrator never dares to descend from her white linen perch: Our armchair critic would prefer to whine about what real art is not than to vulnerably, earnestly try making some herself. But hey, at least this is no tepid review.
