Following a young woman over the course of one 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 novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.
Extravagant, relentless ... Dubno has a particular talent for capturing the vanity, neediness and delusion of a certain type of wealthy ‘benefactor’ ... The novel is at its best where its claim to dramatic realism is thinnest ... If at times the narrative style has the stridency and one-sidedness of a rant, it also possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge ... The repetitiveness becomes a propulsive refrain, like a delirious anger that feeds off its own momentum.
It is less a novel than an artifact of the derangement of present-day literary culture in America ... Happiness and Love is the Temu version of Woodcutters, cringingly imitative but in all areas wanting ... Dubno borrows Bernhard’s sneering italics to hint at a higher, more authentic level of thinking and speaking to which her characters’ stilted commonplaces aspire, but her own voice is little more than the sound of pop culture, college-speak, and midwit clichés clicking against each other in the confines of two covers ... Just as NFT and crypto coins have no substance, but are empty reference points around which money can be accumulated, so this sort of literary fiction has despaired of literary ends, opting instead to peddle highbrow-coded, cachet-laden nullities that appeal to the lower strata of the online blather machine.
Sharp and satirical ... Dubno updates Bernhard’s drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary ... Just as the narrator’s excoriation begins to wear thin, she breaks the tension with wry self-deprecation on her 'sybarite' self. Readers will devour this in one gulp.
