Last year, on a press trip to review an exhibition at the contemporary wing of a major museum in a European capital city, I met my first billionaire. Heiress to one of the continent’s largest private family art collections, she took me for a coffee in the museum which bears her family name. She looked vaguely in my direction while asking polite questions, without listening to the answers. Very graceful behavior, I thought, to even pretend to be interested in me – presumably because, in exchange for this attention, she thought I’d write a nice review of “her” show.

I also very briefly met an extremely famous curator. I was in the European capital city at the same time as a poet I know, who was there to collaborate on a show with him. At a party in an unbelievably expensive apartment, I asked the poet about this curator. “He collects names,” she told me. “He’s like a little boy with a stamp collection. He just wants to know who’s interesting, and he’s delighted when you can tell him about someone he hasn’t heard of.” The whole trip left me with a feeling that hardly anyone there had much interest in art whatsoever, but only in clout and proximity to wealth. This didn’t surprise me; I wasn’t remotely interested in the art that I was there to write about, either.

This same apathy about art, and the attendant fixation on the social capital to which “being in the art-world” grants access, is the subject of Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love (2025). Dubno, like the narrator of her novel, is a writer, who lives between New York and London and who has written about art and fashion and published a handful of taut, disaffected short stories. The book takes place over a single evening, rendered in one unbroken paragraph, as the narrator – a writer forced by her immigration status to return to New York after five years in Rome and London, working on film projects that never take off – attends a dinner party hosted by two of her old art-world friends, artist Eugene (son of a better and more famous artist) and curator Nicole (who specializes in high-budget shows of staggering mediocrity). It’s the night following the funeral of another member of Nicole and Eugene’s little clan, an actress who killed herself after falling into addiction when her career stalled.

Everyone at the party is a posturing idiot. From her position on the couch, the narrator watches the evening unfold with a forensic, cruel detachment cut through with self-loathing, diagnosing each pedantic tic, each shallow gesture, each borrowed opinion, flitting between fatigue, boredom, and rage. Gradually, we enter a claustrophobic and lurid ritual staged by an unhappily married, middle-aged couple that spirals into open warfare – the terrain of playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Eugene gets drunker, more coked up, less coherent, while the party’s late-arriving guest of honor, a young actress visiting from LA, grows increasingly disgusted by what she sees. The gathering tips over the edge, moving from passive-aggressive posturing into full collapse. But unlike Albee’s characters, whose outbursts leave them flayed raw, Dubno’s remain trapped in their performances, even as the party turns farcical.

A reworking of Thomas Bernhard’s fiction Woodcutters (1984), a tirade of scorn about the banality of Mitteleuropean thespians, Happiness and Love is upfront about the miserablist Austrian’s influence. It’s present not only in the single-paragraph form, built on a narrator’s internal monologue of propulsive resentment, but in the sense of suffocating theatricality and shallowness. At one point, the narrator remembers an exhibition curated by Nicole, which set Old Masters paintings alongside contemporary works – a familiar enough approach these days, and one which tends, however inadvertently, to cast the newer artists in an unflattering light. Dubno’s novel does something similar: She borrows Bernhard’s structure and tone to describe a crowd of cultivated philistines comparable to his, American rather than Viennese, and even more “vapid, transactional, louche and pseudo-intellectual” than the participants in European theatre of the 1980s.

To some extent, Happiness and Love is a lament about trying to live as an artist in a world in which new creative forms feel increasingly out of reach, where artistic production is doomed to rotate on the same spot, while being shepherded by holders of massive inherited wealth. The irony of cribbing from the form and structure of a forty-year-old novel by one of the last European modernists to diagnose this problem is presumably not lost on Dubno. And while Bernhard is unignorable here, this is also a book in the same vein as Marcel Proust, who wrote nearly four thousand pages about desperately trying to climb his way into the world of the social elite, only to find it filled with morons.

What makes Dubno’s book so effective is the way the narrator’s contempt folds back in on itself. For all her disgust at the posturing around her, she knows that she herself is not free from sin. She’s returned to this world because some part of her still wants what it promises: relevance, validation, the illusion of connection. The sharpness of her observations is defensive, a way of holding everything at arm’s length, including her grief and regret, which she dips into at points, but never allows to fully emerge. The narrator is cynical about and contemptuous of the world she’s tried to escape from, but she’s aware of her own hypocrisy in how she acts towards her hosts, and she’s painfully conscious of the ways that exposure to this world has poisoned her. Happiness and Love is a novel about the ways in which a culture obsessed with surface, with the fact of being seen, renders everyone emotionally unavailable and monstrous, an object of disgust to themselves.

I was reminded of what the poet told me about the curator in the European capital city: a collector of names. Dubno has captured this world meticulously: not one of artists, but of art-world operators, where curiosity is instrumentalized, taste is status, and intimacy is degraded to social leverage. Happiness and Love is a novel about people who know how to talk about art, but have given up on really caring about it. In a way, it’s the literary fallout of the long cultural shift art historian Serge Guilbaut traced decades ago in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983) – the transformation of artistic ambition into soft power, the conversion of radical aesthetic practice into cultural capital, artworks reduced to tchotchkes stored in the shipping containers of billionaires. Where Guilbaut mapped the institutional mechanics of that shift, Dubno shows us its emotional hangover: a generation more fluent than ever in the language and gestures of creativity, but too stunted, too hollow, too stupid to believe in them.

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Zoe Dubno’s novel Happiness and Love: A Novel (2025) is published in the UK by Doubleday/Penguin Books and in the US by Scribner/Simon & Schuster.