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Synopsis
Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friendsâan artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stand for everything she detestsâHappiness and Love is a piercing debut ...
Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friendsâan artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stand for everything she detestsâHappiness 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 worldâa group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-onâour narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, sheâs 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 Rebeccaâs 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 actressâs arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates themâtheir manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugeneâs 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 hostsâ empty little livesâa hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic worldâa group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-onâour narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, sheâs 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 Rebeccaâs 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 actressâs arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates themâtheir manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugeneâs 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 hostsâ empty little livesâa hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.