Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, takes place over the course of a single Manhattan dinner party during which a narrator finds herself surrounded by an insufferable cadre of former art world friends who she had once hoped never to see again. As the narrator observes the party in silence, regretting her decision to attend, she engages readers in a biting takedown of the materialism, self-obsession, and empty careerism of so-called cultural elites who seem only to be “living to prove that they had lived.”
Loosely inspired by Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984), Happiness and Love is a book-length internal monologue about the strangeness of self-performance and the disquieting way that bourgeois instincts corrode the ability to grieve. With acerbic specificity and impish, animate perception, Dubno’s narrator spirals through memory, insight, delusion, and heartbreak toward a sense of freedom born neither from worshipping nor vacating the self.
Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York whose work has been featured in Granta, The Cut, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere.
We spoke over Zoom about performance, desire, socially-mediated displays of grief, trustworthy criticism, and embracing hatred.
The Rumpus: It was a unique experience to read Happiness and Love, in part because it feels so close in style to a genuine inner monologue. Formally, it fit so well into my head that I sometimes felt it was becoming my own stream of consciousness.
Zoe Dubno: Totally. Hijacking your brain.
Rumpus: I was happy to let it do that. A rising atmosphere of nihilism in the book is fueled by the narrator’s pervasive awareness that everyone around her is performing, trying to justify creative lives and careerism under bizarre and contradictory conditions. How did you think about your narrator’s position and subjectivity inside of the story?
Dubno: The narrator is a little bit less generous than I am, but has a lot of the thoughts that I think you’re liable to have about people that you dislike. You can read anything as performative, because, well… we’ve all read our Judith Butler. All of life is performance. Anything that you are is drag. What is that, RuPaul? “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
You can sit there and think another person is being performative in this way, or in that way, but I think it just depends whether or not you like their performance. And whether you feel that their performance is coming from a place of being genuine, or being open, and what you feel the goal is. I’m super pro-performance and super pro-artifice, in general. It’s a very boring world if everybody is just trying to be nothing. Almost like a No Makeup Makeup version of life. That would be a horrible way to live. I think the characters in Happiness and Love are performative with an aim toward some kind of very sick world domination. I think that’s what the narrator—and what I, as myself—take issue with.
Rumpus: The narrator occupies a liminal, almost selfless position throughout much of the book, from which she is quite critical of anyone who exhibits any kind of desire. What do you feel is the dynamic between desire and self in the narrator’s experience? Does a self require desire? What happens to the self when desire is relinquished?
Dubno: It’s a lot easier to live a life where you know what you want, but it can also be harder, because then you have to experience loss from not getting what you want. If you don’t know what you want, though, you can experience each day as a small loss, bumbling around and feeling vaguely disappointed without necessarily being sure why. At least when you have an actual desire, you can work toward something, someone, anything. In the book, every character exists on a spectrum of desire. Nicole, for example, has no real understanding of what her desires are, and that leads her to suffer, whereas Eugene is extremely certain about what his desires are, and that leads him to suffer. I’m not a Buddhist, but I do a lot of yoga, and I know that desire is the root of all suffering. But I think there’s also a flip side to that in the modern world, where if you don’t desire anything, that can also be the root of all suffering. There’s a version of no-desire that [leads to] being sated, but there’s also a version of no-desire that [leads to] being bored.
Rumpus: Various orientations to Self emerge via the characters in Happiness and Love: For Nicole, selfhood is curated via the acquisition of valuable art and glamorous people. For Eugene, who “[cannibalizes] the artistic innovations of his poorer, more creative friends for profit,” the self depends on performing intellectual superiority. For Rebecca, a self is something that one can “vacate.” For the actress, the self can be a “nonentity.” Is there a particular definition of selfhood you hold that you were defining characters in relation to while writing?
Dubno: That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I think it might be a continuation of the desire question. If you have a stable idea of yourself, that can actually be really harmful, because then you have an ego, a big ego, that you need to maintain, and when you deviate from your own idealized perception of yourself, that causes suffering. I think that’s what the actress character means when she talks about having this whole persona that she’s building, which is actually her career. But she doesn’t know if she’s into that. She realizes she’s actually not into that. Then there is Rebecca, who is maybe somebody who doesn’t feel like she exists or doesn’t want to exist.
The narrator gets to have a more fully-constituted self, because we’re in her mind, right? But from her own mind, when looking at other people, it becomes quite easy for the narrator to think, “Well, that’s a non-entity, or that’s a synthetic person, or that person doesn’t really exist.” But that’s the joy of fiction. You’re in the perspective that you’re in.
Rumpus: The narrator is really interesting to me in terms of her ability to be moved. She’s not, in her head at least, performing a fixed identity. She’s enraged one moment, then hawking critiques toward Eugene and Nicole, then sort of begrudgingly delighted by one of them and laughing to herself. To me, this doesn’t read as the narrator being disingenuous, but rather quite sensitive and alive to experience. Where does this quality of perception come from? How did you find your narrator’s voice?
Dubno: For me, that’s kind of the goal in life: to notice things and be in a state of wonder and joy. I think all the negativity in the narrator actually comes from a very wounded place of wanting to live that life full of wonder and reverence and poetry, and then battling with her inner demons, and also external demons, which manifest as her former friends. In a way, though, those are also inner demons, because those were the people that the [narrator once] sought out. She feels that [something] has been denied to her, and that all that she’s ever wanted is to be pure and gentle and nice—someone who speaks to the fairies in the forests, or whatever. But there’s some kind of sick inside that she also has, which is ambition, [or] desire. It’s an unnameable thing for her, really, because she’s not totally sure how she ended up where she is. I think the narrator feels like she was following this thread toward questions of what it means to live an artistic life, outside of the rest of the world, which is crass and all about making money and about production. She wanted to live outside of that, in a community of artists, but at some point found out that the art world is just a mirror image of the other thing.
The tender bit is the part that’s wounded, and that’s what I really wanted to bring out with the novel. In Woodcutters, Bernhard is so angry. He’s really so angry. There are very, very occasional moments of tenderness in his writing, though. He wrote this six-part memoir—or maybe it’s four parts—which starts when he’s a kid. There are these pieces [of the memoir that take place] when he’s a kid, where you get this famous misanthrope talking about how much he loves [people, like] his grandfather, for example. [At heart,] he’s beside himself with sadness about the world that he wanted to enact. I feel that way all the time. The world is full of unbelievable suffering, especially right now. There’s an active genocide going on. The world is totally fucked. Our country is full of cruelty. So I think for someone to say, “You know what, I’m going to go into this world of art where people are going to be tender and kind with each other”—it’s a great loss when you realize that the art world isn’t necessarily like that. There’s a great loss there.
Rumpus: The book is set at a dinner party that takes place directly after the funeral of the characters’ friend, Rebecca, who is barely mentioned throughout the night. Grief is so present in Happiness and Love, but no one seems to know what to do with it. What do capitalism, self-obsession, and elitism do to our ability to grieve or mourn?
Dubno: Somebody wrote an article recently for Time Magazine about posting online when someone dies, and what constitutes a performative post versus a useful or valid memorial or obituary. It’s one thing online, and another thing in reality. I don’t know if you’ve had—and I hope you haven’t—someone who’s a contemporary in your world, close or far away, pass away. But when it happens, there’s something really, really interesting that [occurs where] people start evaluating their closeness to the person who died. It can be yucky but also beautiful, depending on which way you want to read it. [Sometimes] people exaggerate their closeness to the person, or start being competitive in their grief about who knew the person the best. It’s a very bizarre moment that I wanted to write about, because I have had that happen.
It’s interesting, because when someone you know dies, you want to pay tribute to the person. You really do. And you might have all these thoughts about what it would have been like if they had continued to live. “Could we have become close again, or could this person have made it through their issues to become the person that I used to know?” Or, “Was there something that I could have done as a friend to [better support them]?” There’s also the very swift way that the news cycle of our lives can move past the people we lose. There’s one character, Emily, for whom Rebecca was the center of her life and her closest friend. For a lot of the other people in the book, Rebecca was one of their more pathetic friends who they didn’t even really give a shit about. How do those different contingencies work for people in the afterlife of death? I wanted to express those questions in the party. [People engage] when it’s convenient to remember Rebecca, or when it somehow “adds to the night” to remember Rebecca. But besides that, these people don’t really care about her.
Rumpus: Much of the book takes place fully inside of the narrator’s head. There are a few specific moments, though, where readers are invited briefly to exit her interiority and imagine how she may appear to others at the dinner party. From an outside perspective, she is totally silent throughout the entire night, laughing to herself every so often on the corner of the couch. There’s also a moment when, in response to Nicole’s botox-altered smile, she replies “with a wild smile of my own, with a smile that used every muscle available to me, which is very many more than the average person…”
Imagining the narrator from the outside, there is a creatureliness, or strangeness, to her near-silent engagement in the room. What do you make of the potential rift between the narrator’s inner self-perception and how she might be outwardly seen? What does that say about our ideas about sanity or insanity?
Dubno: There’s nothing normal about the way that the narrator acts. Can you imagine going to a dinner party and not saying anything the entire time? That was an homage to Woodcutters, where of course the narrator doesn’t say anything until the very end either. I wanted to do that too, because it’s so interesting to have a character who a reader is listening to completely, and yet they’ve said nothing.
It was also very important to me that the narrator was a very strong figure. There’s a difference between somebody sitting in the corner not speaking, who is an introverted, shrinking violet, versus someone who is actually very charismatic. The narrator was very clearly somebody who at one point entranced all of these people. I mean, [Nicole and Eugene] wouldn’t just pick up a new little waif and stray and bring them into [their social lives] unless there was something really great about that person. I almost felt like I wanted the narrator to be depriving the other characters of her entertainment value on purpose. She’s sitting there laughing to herself, like “I’m having the time of my life by myself. You guys can’t access this.”
Rumpus: The book has been described as a “vicious takedown.” There is a lot that the narrator is explicitly against, but there are also a few striking moments that hint at the kind of world the narrator might want instead. I was struck by her repeated use of the word cherishing, and by the way she talks about deeply loving books, and having deeply loved her former friends. There is a subtle but insistent tenderness to the narrator that lends credibility to her cynicism and critique because it seems to come from real heartbreak. What, in your mind, makes someone a trustworthy critic?
Dubno: God, a trustworthy critic. I mean, I think when it comes to music or art or books, a critic has to be a true obsessive. Sometimes, I notice that critics who aren’t writers or artists themselves are even more obsessed with the form that they’re interested in than the people who [use that form], maybe because they’re too afraid to actually do it themselves. They’re obsessed with it, and they think of it as this higher thing, and [they develop] this barometer of what is good. I’m thinking of one of my friends, who is a music and opera critic. I’ve never met anybody who knows this much about music. He plays the piano, but you’ll never catch him playing the piano in front of anybody, because he loves it so much that he wouldn’t dare to touch the real stuff.
It can be easy, when you’re young and you don’t know very much, to be a critic out of jealousy. To say, “well, that’s shit, and that’s shit.” To come directly out of being a fan, and then decide to start policing people’s work out of jealousy. I think it happens to the best of us, but I think it’s something that must be outgrown. It is fun to read a mean takedown of something, though, especially when it’s written by somebody who is a real guardian of the form. Criticism is so important because it directs what is important [in art]. It directs the whole conversation about what people are going to make.
Rumpus: The end of the book suggests that it’s possible to wish someone “happiness and love” while also thinking mean things about them. There’s an honesty to that kind of compassion that lends it some grit and credibility, in my eyes.
Dubno: I think that being able to hold those contradictions is the best way to live. Sometimes you can’t forgive somebody. Sometimes, forgiving somebody is actually a complete anathema to your entire way of life. But you also can’t just sit there and let hatred devour you. For the narrator, that’s really important. She’s been avoiding all of New York City—the place she is from and grew up in—for years because of these four fuckers. Like, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. At a certain point, it’s valid to say I was really used and abused by these people, and I’m not forgiving them, and I don’t want to be their friend. And I wish them the very best. Happiness and love. That’s all that we can want for other people, so I wish it for them.
It’s funny… in German, they’re translating the book title as “only the very best,” because apparently “happiness and love” in German doesn’t mean the same thing it means in English. It’s more [akin to] saying, “have a nice day.” It’s much softer. Versus, it’s so out of the ordinary, I think, to say “I wish you happiness and love.” In that meditation, when they have you do it, it really does change something. You’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, I’m gonna wish somebody happiness and love. That’s bizarre, but I’m gonna do it.” And it really does something to you.
Rumpus: In the final scene of the book, the narrator arrives at a sense of “freedom” born from the realization that her involvement with the people she hates is not “inevitable.” As she runs down the Bowery, “unburdened by all of them” she occupies this liminal, almost manic state in which she is suddenly present to her own agency. What do you feel like is the relationship between that sense of non-inevitability and feeling free?
Dubno: I mean, it’s all very Buddhist by accident. We are our own captives. Get free, man. That’s all that you can really do. The end of Woodcutters is different from my ending. For one thing, Woodcutters is autofiction, so those are all his real friends, [which is not the case in my book]. But in the end of Woodcutters, Bernhard’s protagonist also leaves, and starts sprinting as fast as possible. He’s like, “Wow, actually, I’m free. And I’m gonna exercise my freedom by sprinting at top speed in my dinner jacket.” My narrator also gets free and physically goes somewhere else. She learns that these particular people don’t have to matter to her.
I think as people who care about art and writing and live in a city and live in America, we’re some of the luckiest people who’ve ever lived. We have some of the nicest lives of anybody who’s ever lived, and there’s people who don’t have one one thousandth of that luck. To spend all of your time fretting about other people within your small, rarefied environment, and the various ways that they’ve done you harm, is not really a way to be free. Like, you’ve been gifted this incredible freedom. Use it toward a higher thing.
