Book overview
One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year "Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people's idiocies. There's something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield about the narrator...it possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge." --The Spectator Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends--an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests--Happiness and Love is a "deliciously scathing" (Vogue UK) debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.Delivered in a single hilarious, brutal paragraph, this is the story of an evening that slowly self-destructs, as the guests sip orange wine and await the arrival of a newly famous actress. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the night, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts' empty little lives--a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.