Happiness and Love

A young and jaded writer skewers her fellow guests at a decadent dinner party in this sharp and satirical debut from Dubno. The unnamed narrator is back in New York City after spending five years in Europe, where she’d moved after growing tired of her status-obsessed friends. She’s stopped on the street by one of them, an artist named Eugene who steals other people’s ideas. He invites her to dinner in his palatial loft on the Bowery, which he shares with his curator wife. A coterie of young creatives gather at the loft, a “cathedral of modernist rococo,” where Eugene’s drunken chauvinism emboldens Alexander, a virtue-signaling fake-feminist novelist, to spar with the guest of honor, a Hollywood ingenue, over her director’s sexist gender politics. The recent death of the group’s mutual friend—a tender-hearted “almost-actress”—looms over the evening, evoking Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters. Dubno updates Bernhard’s drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary (“beluga caviar on marcelled potato chips, the kitsch, appetizing specialty de la maison of marrying high and low”). 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. Agents: Mollie Glick and Julie Flanagan, CAA. (Sept.)