Zoe Dubno, "Happiness and Love" (Scribner, 2025)

Nov 19, 2025

In this engaging discussion, debut novelist Zoe Dubno sheds light on her provocative work, Happiness and Love. She explores the single-paragraph narrative style inspired by Thomas Bernhard, emphasizing how it captures thought and memory. Zoe critiques the art world's superficiality and careerism through her characters at a dinner party. She humorously reflects on the absurdities of fame and celebrity while discussing the novel's optimistic conclusion, where the narrator finds freedom from toxic relationships.

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INSIGHT

Form Mirrors Thought

Zoe Dubno used a single-paragraph, run-on form inspired by Thomas Bernhard to mirror human thought and associative memory.
The unbroken rant lets the narrator jump between present observations and deep personal histories naturally.

ANECDOTE

Smell, Summer, And Social Memory

Zoe reads a passage describing the narrator's sensitivity to city smells and summer escapes to Rhinebeck with Eugene and Nicole.
The passage shows how small sensory details cue long memories and social judgments.

INSIGHT

Careerism Masks As Culture

The novel critiques an art world that prioritizes status and networks over genuine artistic purpose.
Zoe frames this emptiness as a broader cultural careerism found in politics and power structures.

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Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable 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 (Scribner, 2025) is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.
As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere. Happiness and Love is her first novel.

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