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.
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.
A minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know ... Wryly amusing ... The narrator’s funny and self-indulgent meltdown about how guilty and morally compromised she feels accepting a paid assignment to review a luxury hotel in Miami will resonate with some readers. Others will have their bags packed before you can say 'real artist' or 'real writer' ten times fast.
