HAPPINESS AND LOVE took as its starting point Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel, Holzfällen, translated into English as Woodcutters. When I first read the novel, I was struck by how much Bernhard’s artistic world in Vienna reminded me of my own. An ocean and forty years separate our novels, but I saw something I, regrettably, recognized in his vapid, transactional, louche pseudo-intellectual crowd. Soon after finishing Woodcutters, I began to take apart its structure and seat my own reprobates around the dinner table.

I riffed off the original shape of Woodcutters, a run-in, a funeral, a dinner party, but I allowed my players to explore new, horrible horizons in Happiness and Love. And indeed, both novels share a climax, though I think my optimism at the end of the book, strangely, comes from having read Bernhard, literature’s favorite misanthrope. There he was, sat on the wing chair, angry about the same things I was. Things aren’t uniquely bad now, because there never was a golden age, when all the right things were recognized, and there will always be at least someone who agrees with you. Reading Holzfällen is not essential to understanding my book but really, I can’t recommend it enough.

Zoe Dubno: Happiness and Love, Penguin Random House 2025.