Book Summary and Reviews of Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno

Book Summary

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 stand for everything she detests—Happiness and Love 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.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. The narrator returns to a world she used to be a part of, now as an outsider in "the company of the worst vultures in the world" (page 65) at a party hosted by a "monstrous couple" (page 183). Discuss the reasons for the narrator's attendance at the party. Have you had a similar experience of returning to a place as an outsider or accepting an invitation that you would rather have declined?
2. The narrator is subject to interrogation by her fellow partygoers: she's asked whether she "had been privately educated, if [her] college had been prestigious and culturally relevant, or just prestigious, if [she] had grown up with intellectuals, or if [her] parents had lots of money" (page 83). How does the narrator's class status play a ...