HAPPINESS & LOVE

A wryly amusing debut novel about pretentious New Yorkers acting pretentious.

Here’s the setup: A young writer is back in New York City, at a party “surrounded by the very people that [she has] spent the last five years avoiding” (by going to Europe, of course). Sitting on a white linen couch in her hosts’ fabulous Bowery loft, where she once lived as a guest of the couple she now despises, she excoriates her frenemies and enemies in a long, acerbic, and sometimes very funny rant: rich art owners (like the hosts) who think that by buying art, they become the “sole authority on the work” and then destroy it by licensing it for advertisement or squirreling it away; “people who called themselves artists and directors but in fact worked as content creators and creative directors”; conceptual artists whose pieces interrogate “notions of whateverthehell”; and rich people who cannibalize the taste of poorer friends, remaking their shabby home decor in fancier materials. No one is spared: not the narrator herself, who thinks she’s finally made it when she starts writing articles for fashion magazines about emerging artists and “the things that they cannot live without”; not the host, a mediocre multimedia artist whose love of art “was a trompe l’oeil patina painted with shit onto the sparkling bronze bust that was his inner idiocy, his enduring alcoholism, and…his sex-pestiness”; not the narrator’s more famous writer friend, who wears shabby clothing “in keeping with his idea of himself as a serious person” and reads only contemporary American literature and nothing in translation because he has “so much prose in the original to get through.” That some writers and artists would trade their eye teeth for a chance to earn a living doing something vaguely creative might belie the book’s investment in a very small, rarefied corner of New York intelligentsia and artiness. The narrator’s funny and self-indulgent meltdown about how guilty and morally compromised she feels accepting a paid assignment to review a luxury hotel in Miami will resonate with some readers. Others will have their bags packed before you can say “real artist” or “real writer” ten times fast.

A minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know.