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- [00:00]
Walmart Announcer
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- [00:33]
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- [01:31]
Chris Holmes
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter at Burned by Books. Let's start the show. The reader's initial experience of Zoe Dubnow's debut novel, Happiness in Love, may well be whiplash. Told in the form of a screed that tumbles out of the narrator's consciousness, the narrative moves us back and forth in time, from the unnamed protagonist youth in New York City to the present day in which she has just attended the funeral of her friend. Set in the living room of her former friends, the artists and art world influencers, Eugene and Nicole, the narrator must endure their vanity, lecherousness, and obsession with status at a dinner putatively thrown for their dead friend. Into this emotional morass comes an actor of recent fame whose presence is meant to elevate the social capital of an evening that should, by any measure, require only friendship and commiseration. The actor's presence will be a catalyst to a reckoning about the value and purpose of art, and our narrator will find the escalating chaos parallels her own epiphany that leaving this world behind was its own affirmation about the potential for a different kind of relationship to art. Formerly striking and dagger sharp in its evisceration of at least one organ of the New York City art intelligentsia, Zoe Dubnow's Happiness and Love asks us to recenter feeling in our relationship to art, even if that feeling is deeply and profoundly critical. Zoe Dubnow is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere. Happiness in Love is her first novel. Welcome to Burned by Books. Zoe, hi.
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Zoe Dubnow
Thank you so much for having me. What a great introduction.
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Chris Holmes
Thank you for being here. And I'm wondering if you could start by reading us a little piece of Happiness and Love. I think it's impossible to talk about this book without talking about its very specific form and propulsiveness. So if you'd read something for us and maybe give us a little context as to what, where we're hearing from.
- [04:23]
Zoe Dubnow
Sure. Well, this is from a part in the middle of the book and I chose it because, you know, it's a lot of the book is about the art world and stuff like that, but also a lot of the book is just about the narrator's experiences and general kinds of friendship and what it means to, to have relationships with other people. So it's, it's not exclusive to the art world. So I chose a pit a bit that's sort of more random and about New York. So this is the narrator speaking. The whole book is one paragraph, so it's hard for me to tell you exactly where it is, but it's on page 69. The summer months in the city were unlivable. I have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, which is basically a curse if you're interested in living in a city, especially a city like New York, that's prone to malodor. Even without the piles of garbage that line the sidewalks, the way I imagine rows of hydrangeas can be found along the streets in standard middle class suburban areas in the summer months, the city became completely intolerable for me. And so I was grateful to Eugene and Nicole for inviting me to Rhinebeck, where I was reminded of how much more delicious air is that's been filtered through oak trees rather than the eternal blunt wrap of the city. I knew that my friends who were my contemporaries, who didn't have benefactors the way I had Eugene and Nicole, were though they would never Admit it. Incredibly jealous of my ability to escape the city when it got too sickening. People would pretend that the month of August in the city was the best month because it was gritty and real and only the true New Yorkers were left there. But most of the people saying that had moved to the city from the Midwest or the New Jersey suburbs and clung tightly to the idea of being an authentic New Yorker only because they felt that they had to or else they were living a lie. Real New Yorkers have been leaving Manhattan every summer since the Dutch or whoever it was landed on the island and started ruining everything. The desire for authentic New Yorkerhood drives me crazy because there's no such thing as a New Yorker. Though there are some people like me who grew up here and because of it thought a strip mall was a place for exotic dancers. People like me who never learned to drive and are hopeless whenever they're more than five minutes away from a 24 hour pharmacy. But it's not as though being from New York makes them special. It's actually a mental illness to be from New York. It's rendered me completely moronic when it comes to the great outdoors, where I routinely do things like lie down in what I think is an ideal, but is really a bed of poison ivy concealing a nest of fire ants. As a kid, I seriously thought that the whole earth by default was paved with cement. And on top of the cement, people had planted grass to make Central Park. When I said this to my mother, I was sent away to an outdoors based summer camp without electricity, where we were made to bathe in a lake. Anyway, the whole population of the city is divided in the summer months into those who have access to somewhere better to go and those who have to pretend that sun tanning on a fire escape is glamorous. The transplants showed their transplantiness most when they didn't know that most people who had lived in the city for generations were desperate to leave during the summer. They usually at least had one summer place they could worm their way into, even if it was totally crap, and if they didn't, they were searching for one at all times. But the young people I knew tried to make summer in the city seem like the most intoxicating, hedonistic fun that could possibly be had, like it was an unmissable thrill. And the more they tried to convince me of this, just the way that when a friend messages you many times throughout the night to come to a party because it's really fun, you know it's a disaster. The More. I knew how lucky I was to be transported to Rhinebeck.
- [07:50]
Chris Holmes
Thank you so much. I love a form as function novel and happiness. And love is precisely that. We have a narrative that runs like it's being chased by a bear, working in a single paragraph and in a single unbroken thought that meanders on tangents past and present. How did you come to this form and, and how do you think it matches and accelerates the kind of thinking that the narrator is doing?
- [08:19]
Zoe Dubnow
Well, I came to this form because I read Thomas Bernhard's the Woodcutters, along with a number of his other books, especially his memoirs, which are similarly written in this one paragraph rant. And I thought, oh, my God, you can put anything you want in a novel like this. You know, in a. In a traditional novel, you can, of course, have, you know, politics and aesthetics and friendships and plot and character. But in this kind of rant, even though it seems like it's something that's more constricting, like, you know, everything has to be this unbroken thought, actually, it's the way that the mind works is you can jump from one thought to another. You can look at a person and remember your whole history with them and go deep into that, or you can look at a thing and, and have opinions about some physical object that run deep into philosophical whatever. So I, I read Thomas Bernhardt and I went, oh, my God, that's. That's what I want to do. I want to write a book like that. So that's how I came to the one paragraph. And, and once I started with the one paragraph, I was like, oh, my. I realized, you know, when I was younger and I was in school, I would get in trouble writing essays because I would write sentences that really were like a full page. And sometimes, you know, a teacher would be like, you know, technically, if you really think about it, this is a grammatically correct sentence. You know, you can make a sentence that. That's what Bernard does. And in the, in my book, I have sentences that go for a whole page, because for me, that's, that's. I mean, you're listening to me talk right now. That's kind of how I talk, in a kind of digressive, circular, whatever, long winded, perhaps, but. So when I read Thomas Bernhardt, I was like, the reason I read it in the first place was that somebody said to me, you're so Thomas Bernhardt, as I was complaining and ranting about something to them. And so then I went, what's that? And I read it and I was like, oh, you're right. I, I am so mad. I, I. What a high compliment to be compared to someone who's like, the genius. I don't, you know, I don't.
- [10:24]
Chris Holmes
What era is Bernhardt writing in?
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Zoe Dubnow
So this book is one of his last novels. This is 1980, I think. Published 1984.
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Chris Holmes
Okay.
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Zoe Dubnow
Bernhard was born in the 1930s. He, he came of age during, so maybe in the 1920s. He can't, he came of age during the German occupation of Austria, but he, as a novelist. This book is, is from the 80s. But it's interesting that you ask that, because when I first read the Woodcutters, part of it was, I went, when is this book written? Wh, when is this book written? This book is a 19th century novel. No, I mean, it's too modernist because. But it's in this register. But it's also contemporary. Very, very contemporary. I was shocked that it was from the 80s, which was part of the, the allure to me.
- [11:11]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, no, I, I hadn't heard of Thomas Bernhardt or the Woodcutters, but now I'm, I'm fascinated to, to read this, you know, plot out of time that does the, the wonderful, like, run on thought. And I tend to think about, you know, you, you described it so well, but I tend to think about your narrative style and I guess Bernhardt's, as something much closer to how we actually think than, than, you know, in sentence, traditional, like, short, didactic sentence forms. And we're always, like, weaving in memory with present. And, and, you know, and I think that what the novel does that I like so much is like, give us another human being's thought process. And so were you thinking about it as sharing kind of your own thought process without the content as well as your narrators?
- [12:03]
Zoe Dubnow
Yeah, I mean, well, for me, the narrator isn't me, and she has some thoughts that I don't necessarily agree with, but I found it very fun to, like, inhabit the narrator's mind and just allow them to go from thought to thought. That was very much the writing process. Like, it wasn't like, okay, now on page 10, I'm going to start about my thoughts about how this thing is annoying and then about how this character is like that. No, it was like, that's. The Woodcutters also takes place at a dinner party. And that's what I found so amazing. It was like, well, if you just have people at a dinner party, it's almost like a play. Like, you see the, and then certain things react from each other. It's very existentialist. Certain things can. Can bounce off of each other, and then you move from thing to thing, and it guides you. And so I imagined myself or my narrator sitting at that. At that thing. And I thought, okay, so what happens next? They eat dinner. And. And, you know, now the food is served. So what. What. What does that spark for me? Okay. I'm looking at the food. I'm think I'm making up what the food is. I'm. I'm. I'm being dragged along this thing. But that really is how we experience at night.
- [13:11]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. And. And dinner parties. I mean, I hope that this is like a constant writing exercise in creative writing classes to, you know, craft a dinner party scene, because it just seems perfect for. For conjuring all manner of not only interesting discussion, but also disasters.
- [13:30]
Zoe Dubnow
That's a great idea. Yeah.
- [13:32]
Chris Holmes
So Happiness and Love is both about the New York City art world and not. The narrator's former friends work at galleries. They work with galleries to place their shows. They write books. They make art. But as the story proceeds, we realize that they are uninterested in any aspect of that world that doesn't directly touch or endorse them. They wear blinders thick enough to obscure any real purpose or value in the actual making of art. Can you talk a little bit about this split that. That happens and how you wanted to sort of give us a vision of an art world that was devoid kind of of the art?
- [14:11]
Zoe Dubnow
It's so funny, as you were saying that, I was, like, reminded of, like, a very Trumpian thing where. Where Trump is like, we. They like. They like Trump. I'm. I'm gonna. I like them. They like Trump. And it's. It's. You know, when Trump does that, it's like one of the rare human moments about him, for me, where I'm like, that's right. You. You can very easily start to like somebody just because they like you.
- [14:35]
Chris Holmes
Yeah.
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Zoe Dubnow
That is what I think happened to my narrator for a long time is that these people. She had an inkling that there was something deeply empty about them, but they liked her. They. They saw something in her. And so she went, I like these people. But only after kind of absenting herself for a while, she could go, oh, those were bad people. Like, those were stupid and mean people. They just liked me. So I thought they were great. Yeah, it's. It is quite interesting the way that the art world, but tons of different worlds lend themselves to this empty careerist maneuver that, you know, that's what a lot of politics is about.
- [15:16]
Chris Holmes
Yeah.
- [15:17]
Zoe Dubnow
It's not about people that are interested in making certain policies. It's about people that are interested in power. That's how power works. You know, abuse of power comes as no surprise. Jenny Holzer. That's art. But, like. So I think that, you know, some of these people also, you know, the thing about a novel that's from one fixed perspective is that's just the narrator's take. I'd be interested now that I'm like, I'm so. You know, I wrote this book, like, three years ago. I'm so far removed from it that now I'm like, God, wouldn't it be nice to read this book from the perspective of one of the other characters and see if maybe on their inside they perceive themselves to be extremely, you know, virtuous, have no interest in success, have no interest in money. But actually they perceive the narrator or they perceive the other characters to be a completely different thing than they are.
- [16:08]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. Which, as. As is the way. Right. That's, you know, assuredly. Yeah. Eugene, for all his horribleness, would. Would see himself as the most devoted to the. To the ethos of art and to its, you know, core values and.
- [16:25]
Zoe Dubnow
Yeah.
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Chris Holmes
And perhaps they were, like, you can imagine at some point, Nicole and Eugene having had more of a kind of idealistic relationship to it. But you sort of become part of that world, as you say, a careerist world, where it's constantly like, who do you know, and who can you have over for dinner? And it's, you know, so the narrator falls under their sway in part because they like her, but also because they have a lot of the things that she would hope to have, like a relationship to the art world. And by. They represent a kind of success and glamour and. And, you know, perhaps at the. A commitment to art. But over time, the narrator comes to understand that whatever love they had for art is, you know, perverted and twisted. And I wanted to know more about how you came to the characters of Nicole and Eugene and how they became this kind of catalyst for this driving anger of the narrative of our narrator's form there.
- [17:31]
Zoe Dubnow
Well, with the characters, I kind of. There's a great. I actually hadn't read this book when I was writing my book, but afterwards I read There's a book by Kingsley Amos called Old Devils.
- [17:43]
Chris Holmes
Ooh, I haven't read that one.
- [17:45]
Zoe Dubnow
It's. It's such an annoying book. I mean, the whole point. The whole. Basically, in the foreword or in the afterword, I think Kingsley Amis wrote. What I did was I wrote a List of the most annoying characteristics. And then I made characters one through six, and then I divvied them out to the different characters. And then I had them all live in an old age home together. And so that's what his book was. This infuriating group of characters. I mean, it's a funny book because it's Kingsley Amos, but it's also a deeply. I mean, what. What a. What an ass. Kingsley Amos. And so it has a lot of that in it, too. He's made these characters really annoying and mean and bad. So without realizing it, because I don't think I'd read that book, then I kind of did a similar thing. I was like, what. What are these things that I want to dig into? It pissed me off. And so I was like, okay, great. So there's going to be the main central husband and wife character, similar to the Woodcutters. I went, okay. And the Woodcutters, there's the hosts of the dinner party, there's three guests, there's the actor that they're all waiting for, and there's their dead friend. That's all I got. That's what the whole Woodcutters basically is. And then it's Bernhard's random thoughts about the Austrian art world. So I'm like, great. I can. I can just say my hosts are going to be this married couple. And the, okay, he's going to do this, she's going to do. Which are different than Bernhard's things, but they're my things. Like, I. When I was trying to pick something to read, I was thinking of, you know, Eugene always is copying the furniture of his friends, but making it fancier and nicer. And that's something that I'd seen before. And it just drove me crazy. Like when somebody goes, oh, wow, what a nice, like, thrift store cup thing that you have that was so interesting and. And bizarre and something that you prize. Well, I'm quite rich, so I'll just make a copy of that. But fancier and more of them. And you're like, by making the characters. Yeah, I just kind of thought of things to. To, you know, I used to do. I used to. This is maybe embarrassing, but I used to do improv.
- [19:56]
Chris Holmes
It's not. That's kind of awesome.
- [19:58]
Zoe Dubnow
Something in improv is that you could say, like, people would say, I. I gift. I gift you with this. Like, you would gift your scene partner with something by saying, wow, what long, beautiful hair you have. And that would be gifting you with something. But that's kind of how I thought of it. I was. I was gifting all the different characters with these attributes. So good, so good. So good. New markdowns are on at your Nordstrom Rack store. Save even more. Up to 70% on dresses, tops, boots and handbags to give and get. Cause I always find something amazing. Just so many good brands. I get an extra 5% off with my Nordstrom credit card Total queen treatment. Join the Nordy Club at Nordstrom Rack to unlock our best deals. Big gifts. Big, big perks. That's why you rack.
- [20:45]
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- [21:14]
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- [21:24]
Chris Holmes
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- [21:28]
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- [21:59]
Chris Holmes
There's that. You're saying that about furniture. There's that incredible moment where you talk about Alexander buying some chair that Ben Lerner convinces him to get, but it's really uncomfortable. I loved that moment.
- [22:13]
Zoe Dubnow
Thank you. It's funny that you bring that up because that one specific thing is one of two overt homages to Thomas Bernhardt in the book. Because I say that Ben Lerner made him buy this wingback chair. And in the way that my book has the white sofa, the Woodcutters has a wing back chair. So I. I was wondering, how can I get a wing back chair?
- [22:38]
Chris Holmes
Might as well have it be Ben Lerner, right?
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Zoe Dubnow
Yeah. Ben Lerner made him buy this wing chair.
- [22:44]
Chris Holmes
And it is funny to me how some writers take on an iconic status in which they stand in for certain things. So you didn't even need to describe much about Ben Lerner for him to stand in for. To just carry an enormous amount of baggage Good and bad into it. And it's funny. It's also funny because I think, as opposed to like the rest of the world of celebrity, there are so few celebrity writers in the American consciousness, I think. Do you find that to be true? And like, when you think about like iconic authors, is. Is it a small list for you?
- [23:22]
Zoe Dubnow
I think that the people that I find to be famous, when, when I, When I was younger, we would play like among my parents and their friends and their kids, a whole group of people. We would play that game celebrity, where you.
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Chris Holmes
Yeah, we did that too. Yeah.
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Zoe Dubnow
And there were certain people that nobody outside of our group would know. But like, like there was a. There was a guy who was one of the chefs at Zabars called Chef Boris, where everyone knows Chef Boris. Chef Boris was our celebrity. So. So he was. He was in with us. There were a bunch of people that were celebrities to us that remains. I mean, there's a bunch of neighborhood celebrities. For me, there's the guy that looks like Tom Stoppard, that is always at the bagel place near my house, that my boyfriend and I are always like.
- [24:11]
Chris Holmes
It probably is Tom Stoppard.
- [24:14]
Zoe Dubnow
You just need to like that it was Tom Stoppard. But I was like, that's seriously not Tom Stoppark. But. But he was a tall guy. Anyway. Yes. I think that it is a shame that we don't currently have, you know, nationwide literary celebrities the way that we might have used to. But a lot of my friends are writers and a lot of my friends are people that read. So we have people that we all like. And I feel like I don't need business to care what other people think about things.
- [24:43]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, yeah. Fair, fair. So the. I. I want to talk about the humor of the book because it's a really funny book and it's got a lot of sort of laugh out loud moments. And you know, I think of a lot of the humor coming from the narrator's just sort of verbosity, which is sort of turn turned on people like a fire hose. At one point, she says of Eugene, I admired him for not even attempting to conceal who he really was. To pretend that he was not a self involved, predacious remora, a suckling, ravining piranha. Talk to us a little bit about how you crafted some of these unhinged rants and how like a kind of pure linguistic performance is. Is part of it.
- [25:30]
Zoe Dubnow
Well, thank you for saying my book is funny. I think part of it was while I was working on this book, I was doing my Fiction mfa. And John Kean, the great writer and poet, was my advisor. And every week I would take him new pages. And I think part of my goal was just to entertain John. And I think that that's a really great way of writing a book. Having to show someone that you really respect and admire something every week. So. And sometimes he would underline, you know, he'd give me notes and he'd be like, more like this. And I'd be like, yeah, I know. More like that. That's like the best thing I wrote. Like, it's hard. You know what I mean? You'd be like, this is really funny. Make everything more like this. And I'm like, yeah, I'd like to also.
- [26:14]
Chris Holmes
So part.
- [26:16]
Zoe Dubnow
Part of it was that part of it is that I am a generally talkative and, you know, verbose individual. So if I'm writing a book, it'll probably be like that. I don't think that I could write straight up, you know, I don't know. Tear jerker of a situation. Maybe I could, who knows? But yeah, I. I think that. I mean, I love funny books. Funny books are what I like to read. I mean, I like to read the more serious stuff too. But like, like Proust, Bruce is really, really funny. Proust is a serious comedian. Like, that is what he. And you know, over the course, a novel is an amazing medium for being funny because something that's the funniest is returning to jokes. And really, as with our closest friends, when you really know someone, you can make fun of them really well. And when something happens to them, you can both laugh at that. So, I mean, that's why with the Proust, you can be like, this is some of the funniest literature I've ever read. Because you're on book four, you know, and a character comes back that we've known for like thousands of pages, and you're like, oh, this guy does something. That's so classic, this guy. So. So, yeah, I mean, it was by design that the book is funny. I'm glad that you found it funny as well. Not just me.
- [27:34]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. No. And I mean, you're giving a gift to folks who haven't read Proust yet to. To find him a great comic writer.
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Zoe Dubnow
Oh, God. Yeah.
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Chris Holmes
I thought as I was reading this that a subtitle for happiness and love could be Guess who's Coming to Dinner? Part of the conceit of the novel is that Eugene and Nicole are so self interested that they have invited an up and coming actor to dinner following Rachel's funeral. Eugene hopes to sleep with her and Nicole hopes that she reflects her ever broadening circle of artistic influence. When she arrives, she begins in short order to tear the veil off this gross gathering. She engages the foul Alexander in a conversation about who and what art is for. And her argument is that people like those at this dinner are gatekeepers who hold the pleasures of writing and reading and art museums at art arm's length, trading joy for disdain and critique. How did you think about this actor sort of entering in as a kind of like guess who's coming to dinner sort of figure or catalyst to a kind of truth telling moment in it and then. Yeah, and, and talk a little bit about her philosophy and, and theory of art.
- [28:51]
Zoe Dubnow
Well, it's interesting that you say that right after we were talking about the Proust thing, but I think one of my main things that I wanted the actress to kind of get across is people that act like art is this thing that needs to be. Yeah. Gate kept protected. It's incredibly highbrow to a degree that other people can't understand it. It's some protected thing actually make it so that a lot of people think that something like Proust, something like, you know, highbrow is difficult to understand and therefore shouldn't even be attempted when actually attempted to read or engage with. And actually those things are classics. Those things are good for a reason, which is that they're good, like they're enjoyable and good to read. And actually if you just put a little bit of effort into not looking at TikTok or something just as readable as any other book, like that's a.
- [29:41]
Chris Holmes
Lot of effort for a lot of people.
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Zoe Dubnow
Yeah, but you know what? If you can read my book, you can read like you. Come on, you know, come on, read the Proust. It's going to make you feel so good. There's so much literature that's just so good that people act like you need some kind of PhD or like high level of understanding to read. And it really is. There's a great Virginia Woolf essay about middle brows and low brows and eyebrows and how middle brow people act like highbrow people are snooty and low brow people are stupid. But actually it's the high brows and the low brows who completely understand each other, which is that it's just stuff. Just read stuff. Don't. Don't act like the stuff is highbrows. Don't act like the stuff is important. They just are like this is great stuff. And low brows just are really doing what they're doing and the two of them can really understand stuff. But the actress, so that, that comes from the, the waiting for someone thing is like basically the only plot point of the Woodcutters is that they're waiting for this actor to arrive. And in the Woodcutters, it's a, a actor from the Viennese Burg Theater, which is their, like state theater. And he comes in with all of this stuff about theater and the Viennese National Theater. And that has nothing to do with our world or anything that we experience now. I mean, it would that we had a national theater. Perhaps someone could say, yeah, I think Trump is now the creative director of our national Theater. So I mean, I mean, whatever.
- [31:13]
Chris Holmes
But it'll just be Cats on a constant repeat.
- [31:17]
Zoe Dubnow
Exactly like whatever. So I mean, I'd read a book where someone was talking about Hamilton. But anyway, we, we were waiting for this actress who is going to unmask everyone at the, at the dinner in a similar way that happens in the Woodcutters. You know, spin the whole thing on its head, really change the vibe. And so I thought, well, a Hollywood actor is interesting to come into this world of people that would consider themselves high brows to interact with somebody that's a Hollywood actor who they would think is the destroyer of, of the kind of culture that they love. But also, as you were just saying, it's not as if we have very many intellectual celebrities anymore or, or literary celebrities. So this person, these people are, are interested in celebrity. And a bonafide Hollywood celebrity is going to really mess with their conception of the world in their evening. So that's why I had the actress come in. And as to her specific views, I mean, there are things that the actor says that I agree with and things that I, I don't agree with with what the actress says, you know, but.
- [32:24]
Chris Holmes
Is part, I, I mean part of it for me was that was interesting was that there's a friction. And I think we feel it through the narrator because she sort of, you know, she moves back and forth into like really buying that what the actor's saying and, and also being like, oh no, that seems like a disaster. And part of the friction is that her, her ideology for, of art for all also might come into conflict with the fact that it sounds like maybe a lot of her movies are kind of bad.
- [32:53]
Zoe Dubnow
Yes.
- [32:54]
Chris Holmes
So I, I. Do you want to say a little bit about that and how your narrator responds to this, this problem of an ideology that could be really good and important, but also comes with some interesting.
- [33:04]
Zoe Dubnow
Baggage Well, I think it's back to what I was just saying about, like, masterpieces being inaccessible. There's a difference between saying everybody can read a masterpiece and saying what everybody thinks is a masterpiece is one. Like, there is an ongoing debate. I think as genre fiction becomes more and more popular and fantasy novels become more and more popular, you will see a lot of people, especially now that my book is out and I've. I've interacted with the kind of paraliterary apparatus where people will say, just because a book has dragons and whatever in it doesn't make it not literary fiction. I can't believe that there are these distinctions and da, da, da, and whatever. But I think that it is important to have safeguards against that, because if. If everything was very smut, as they call it themselves, then I don't know that that would be a very fruitful literary culture for us. So there's a difference between saying all masterpieces are accessible and everything that somebody thinks is a masterpiece is one. Does that make sense?
- [34:09]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, absolutely. No, that. That's really helpful. The end of the novel takes a sudden tilt into almost a kind of sentimental positivity or optimism. It could have been treacly or it not for the fact that the narrator also manages to wish revenge upon those who she chooses to see as fully human. And I wondered if you'd talk a little bit about what made you reach for optimism in a pessimistic age, especially in a novel where it's pretty pessimistic for, you know, seven eighths of it.
- [34:44]
Zoe Dubnow
I think that that was just the ending. Like, as I wrote it, I wrote. I didn't write the novel with an ending in mind. It's that. That's how I had just sat through that dinner party, you know, having written it. And I went, well, that's how I feel. That's how. That's how the novel. I mean, that's how the novel ends. That's how the narrator feels like, wow, guys, I'm out. I just gave myself this baptism by shit. And. And now I'm out. Like, I don't actually have to be caught up with these people anymore. I'm free. So that, I think, really is just how I wanted it to end, by freeing the. Freeing the narrator.
- [35:26]
Chris Holmes
And is she freed in part because she doesn't have to take on the. The jaded cataractic pessimism of the. The members of the dinner party. She can. She can have a different vision of. Of her world going forward, even as she kind of hates those People.
- [35:45]
Zoe Dubnow
Yes, yes. I think it's that. I think it's also even. Even as the novel had started, she hadn't seen these people in years, and she was still even in absentia letting them ruin her life. You know, there were higher spheres of the world that she couldn't enter, even though she was halfway around the earth. So I think by being like, wait a minute. Why have I let these people that I don't respect have so much control over me? That doesn't make any sense. Like, I think by having that experience, she was. She's able to get free.
- [36:17]
Chris Holmes
Well, before I let you go, Zoe, I'd love to know a little bit about what you've been reading and loving recently.
- [36:24]
Zoe Dubnow
Well, now I want to. I mean, for my recommendations, I just want to give my. Last night, I did this reading that was called Fashion Fiction, where they had people read bits. Obviously, my book contains a lot about fashion in the fashion world, so I included that. But then I also was just curious of the people there who were all mostly women that were interested in fashion and fiction. I was like, who here has read the Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir? And, like, two people there, one of whom was like, one of the reader's moms had read the Mandarins. And I was like, guys, you should read the Mandarins, because that's one of the best books I've ever read. And it has, like, hilarious things about fashion, but also about, you know, relationships, love, politics, moral doubt. I mean, it's Simone de Beauvoir, so tons of, like, moral questions, and I.
- [37:12]
Chris Holmes
Don'T know it at all.
- [37:13]
Zoe Dubnow
Oh, my God. See? Okay, so. So I'm. I'm bullish on the Mandarins. Everybody's a lot of reef mandarins.
- [37:20]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. I mean, clearly, I have to. But I want to know more about your fiction and fashion event. Like, who was there and what was the.
- [37:29]
Zoe Dubnow
That was an event that's run by a nice girl called Michaela Dairy, who used to run the events at McNally Jackson. And she started this, and she invites a combination of novelists and people that write about fashion for magazines to read either fiction about fashion or their. Either their own stuff or some people read, like, critical pieces that they'd written about fashion designers or. Or, you know, basically a kind of open thing with the theme of fashion, which I found to be so great because it's kind of like the fashion world is very interested in literature in this slightly disingenuous way right now where there's, like, people holding books, going down runways and. And you know, I mean, I think it's. I think it's nice in a certain way that, like, you know, Chanel will have, like, a book club club thing or a book podcast or a mew. MEW has this literary thing. And I think that's great. I mean, I think that's all great, but it's not. Those books aren't necessarily about fashion. So it's interesting to have, like, a kind of flip that on its head, have people talking about writing about it. You know, the fashion people are using literature to manufacture some kind of highbrow intellectual thing for themselves. But what about. What about in the other direction?
- [38:46]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, no, that sounds. That sounds great.
- [38:49]
Zoe Dubnow
Yeah.
- [38:50]
Chris Holmes
So I definitely now feel bullish about the. The Mandarins, but I am also excited to recommend Zoe Dubno's Happiness and Love, and I hope my listeners will run out and get a copy. It is fantastic. It's propulsive. It is very invested in questions of how the art world can speak to many people while also having a vision that can be critical and. And powerful in other ways. And it's a such a nice chance to get to talk to you about it.
- [39:24]
Zoe Dubnow
Zoe, thank you so much. One thing I will say, though, is that famously, because he keeps making fun of me for saying it all the time, my grandpa, who was a union lawyer, it was like, you know, this book actually just reminded me of when I would have to go to dinner with, like, the deputy mayor of Philadelphia. Like, they're marketing it all wrong. When they say it's about the art world, it's about everything. I'm like, okay, papa.
- [39:49]
Chris Holmes
No, it totally is. And it's about, like, the power of the dinner party as, like, a place to. To spark dialogue about anything. But also, that is a. It reveals people in very interesting ways. And that's, you know, that's where we get to kind of the climax of the book is how a dinner party reveals the true character of all these different folks. So let's pitch it that way.
- [40:12]
Zoe Dubnow
Totally.
- [40:13]
Chris Holmes
So thanks so much, Zoe, and I hope we'll get a. A chance to talk again soon.
- [40:17]
Zoe Dubnow
Thank you so much.
- [40:24]
Chris Holmes
Well, that's all for me from now. My thanks to Zoe Dubno for coming on to talk about her debut novel, Happiness and Love. You can find links to purchase Happiness and Love and all of Zoe's recommended books at the website Burn by books Dot Com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.
- [41:12]
Zoe Dubnow
Sam.