The history of resistance to Japanese American internment echoes through the fight against ICE today, with key differences but revealing similarities about our political reality.
Happiness and Love turns politics into an identity rather than a set of practices that correspond to our lived conditions. (Mallika Vora / Bay Area Current)
I don’t know if anyone else has this instinct at stores that are trendy. Some sort of indie music comes on, something with a beat that’s there to sync up with as you paw through the racks. The experience is designed to make you feel like a main character — sometimes my friends and I call her “a lady in a movie.” In these situations, I feel a gut-level need to avoid catching the beat while I shop. But I’m still in the store, letting the music do its smooth-braining operation on me. Letting me feel like I have taste (or at least the money to execute on it), even if I’m probably too broke to buy anything there.
The premise of Happiness and Love, by Zoe Dubno, seems to be about this experience. The unnamed protagonist of the book is so read in that she can scan someone and know they’re wearing Khaite, but still positions herself as too pure to buy in, too off-beat.
Inspired by Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, the book takes place over a single evening, with the memories of the unnamed protagonist interleaved, unfolding as she encounters people throughout the night. The protagonist is a writer who fled for London, but has recently come back to New York City, her hometown. She runs into Eugene, a friend from a previous life, downtown. He invites her to a dinner at his house hosted in honor of an up-and-coming actress, but also for them to gather after a memorial for one of their friends, Rebecca, who’d died of an overdose. Rebecca is described as a beautiful, young aspiring actress who lived kind-of-method — interested in obliterating herself for her art, but equally fixated on self-definition. Eugene is a “photographer and multimedia artist,” who is really just the son of a famous artist, good at imitation, ingratiating himself with the right gallery owners; he’s also a sex pest. His partner, Nicole, a “curator” is a generationally rich woman who funds Eugene’s lifestyle and wants to be known as a person who has taste.
The book makes liberal use of italics for dialogue, and it serves the double function of describing unctuous rich-person talk about their tastes and properties to people in the know. It also serves as a cue to let us know what the protagonist is noticing — a version of her highlighting inane rich-person jargon: benefactors, an emerging artist, reading theory, directing a fashion film, the realm of culture, the intellectual.
I feel like I’ve read a version of this book a million times before. It’s the ultimate cool-girl book that gets circulated within the same art and media institutions it criticises.
As the night unfolds, the protagonist brings us deeper into the events that make her disillusioned with this set: a relationship with a celebrated, entitled, and insecure manbaby author, Alexander, that soured (he tried to tank her burgeoning writing career in retaliation); the way Eugene and Nicole had sort of treated her like a pet, and vague allusions to a shitty, potentially sexual, encounter she had with both of them. At the core of her repulsion is the sense of disgust with herself for “selling her soul” for the nice things they could afford and she couldn’t, for how she’d bought their high-minded, cultured art-people schtick. Selling her soul meant putting up with being Nicole’s friend to stay at their property upstate or suffer through their insistence on loving to read “theory” to have access to their books.
At one point, she talks about writing sponcon for a fashion magazine:
“Whenever there is money to be easily made one forgets to account for the price in net losses of soul. You must remember that the price of every salad nicoise expensed to a fashion magazine is paid for in soul, and that after you’ve asked enough emerging artists about their morning routine, the things that they cannot live without… you begin to wonder where on earth your soul has escaped to, until you track it down to the Conde Nast ePayables invoicing site.”
I feel like I’ve read a version of this book a million times before. It’s the ultimate cool-girl book that gets circulated within the same art and media institutions it criticises. It gets literary representation and marketing and the whole thing.
What really disturbs me, though, is the way the book deals with politics. Later in life, the protagonist becomes friends with some left podcast bros. She’s “curious about the podcast, but not curious enough to debase [herself] by listening to it” (presumably because she’s so busy reading real books and thinking real thoughts that she never bothers telling us about). The protagonist also works with an editor at a fashion magazine who joked to her that “she really had abandoned dialectical materialism for straight materialism” without telling us what the editor was working on, how it was political, how it connected with the world down here at all. Politics is deployed as an aesthetic in this book, a marker of value (or lack thereof), but rarely anything deeper.
Politics is deployed as an aesthetic in this book, a marker of value (or lack thereof), but rarely anything deeper.
In one early scene, the protagonist describes a beautiful red blanket that Rebecca had owned, and that Eugene had seen. Later, she sees an expensive, bespoke version of the same blanket in his house. This uptake of the tastes of proletarians, and the selling back down, is a feature of all modern, capitalist culture. Eugene is a clown for it. But truly, in a world that is being stripped for parts by the worst of the worst crooks, where resources are cartelized and children are bombed and starved, who cares?
It troubles me that this has become a recurring theme in literary fiction — politics is reduced to an aesthetic, a little accessory a character can carry around. There are so many urgent questions that literature should be grappling with. There’s something insidious about this type of literature, this type of “theory” — it deludes us into thinking that questions about preferences are on equal footing with questions about politics.
Why do these types of books get so much hype? It takes such little imagination to write them. They’re so deeply unearnest. They turn politics into an identity rather than a set of practices that correspond to our lived conditions. Reading these books becomes a proxy for doing politics.
The book is a knot — the protagonist is disgusted by how she fell for the promise that these art people held for her, that you could be cultured and rich, make political art and live the good life. But to make these rich art people the subject of a whole book doesn’t leave much room for anything besides a type of insideryness that’s really hard to get through. The only position that someone can hold toward these people — is of sneering disdain. That’s how you beat them at their own game. And in effect, the protagonist becomes the ultimate insider, the true arbiter of taste. It makes them too important, and it reinforces the worldview they deploy to keep themselves at the top.
And sure, I guess you can say the book is satirical — its unsparing detail shows how silly these people are. If so, it does what it sets out to do. I hate everyone involved. I just wish the author had White Tiger-style killed Eugene and Nicole at the end. It makes me want to take a shower, apply my barrier serum, the upscale eye cream that I found in the Marshall’s beauty section, the hypoallergenic tinted sunscreen I’m partial to, and pretend I’d never read it.
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