Imperfect Pleasures

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno. Scribner, 224 pages. 2025

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes. New York Review Books, 136 pages. 2025.

On the inside cover of the advanced reader’s edition of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness & Love, one finds in the title font the heading “Marketing & Publicity,” and beneath it the following list:

NATIONAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
INDIE NEXT NOMINATION CAMPAIGN FOR SEPTEMBER 2025
“MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF FALL 2025” CAMPAIGN
PREPUBLICATION BUZZ CAMPAIGN
TARGETED ONLINE ADVERTISING
VIDEO TRAILER
BIG MOUTH MAILING AND MICROINFLUENCER OUTREACH
GOODREADS PROMOTION
S&S EMAIL PROMOTION
SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTION
AUTHOR EVENTS IN NEW YORK

I was dismayed to receive a finished copy and find that all this had been omitted; it is a loss, because this interweaving of art’s semblance and careerism is both the book’s subject and that which it epitomizes, so much so that it is less a novel than an artifact of the derangement of present-day literary culture in America.

Dubno’s unnamed protagonist spends her time meeting people she doesn’t like and doing things she doesn’t like in a New York she may or may not like but that is certainly less cool than London, where she was living until her visa ran out. Walking along the Bowery to find inspiration for her writing, she takes a potshot at those “people who have ruined the word flâneur for those of us who so desperately need flânerie in order to exist,” and who fail to grasp that it “is not a subject but a literary archetype.” She runs into Eugene, “a man who could reasonably be called one of my closest friends,” as he exits a trendy café. He informs her of the death by overdose of their friend-in-common Rebecca, who had left New York to detox at her mother’s home in Massachusetts. Eugene then takes advantage of the narrator’s “fragile emotional state” to invite her to a dinner party in honor of an actress he says she will have heard of, adding that his wife, Nicole, will be delighted to see her.

Eugene is a “multidisciplinary artist” (italics in original) and the son of a more famous artist who has passed down his money and connections but not his talent; Nicole is an art collector, the daughter of a financier, and the real cash behind their “cathedral of modernist rococo” on the Bowery and their “beautiful farmhouse in Rhinebeck.” As a young woman, the narrator lived with these “rakish benefactors” in the former residence, and continued to vacation with them upstate in the latter, even as she realized they’d “bamboozled” her. Now, after five years of avoiding them, she finds herself drawn back into their web, or rather onto their Restoration Hardware sofa, where she sits for the bulk of the novel recalling their and their friends’ infamies.

For the literate, this should ring a bell: it is the plot of Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters. Vienna is transposed into Manhattan, the Graben into the Bowery, Eugene and Nicole are the Auersbergers, Rebecca is the “movement artist” Joana, and the actress is the actor from the Burgtheater returning from a performance of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. An unnamed narrator in all respects like Bernhard himself sits in a wing chair in the Auersberger’s Viennese apartment remembering the years he spent as their disciple at their country estate in the fictional town of Maria Zaal in Styria (the Auersbergers were modeled on Gerhard and Maja Lampersberg, whose Tonhof was an artistic retreat in Maria Saal in Carinthia).

Bernhard’s book had been risky—Austria is a country obsessed with propriety, where insult to honor (Ehrenbeleidigung) is an imprisonable offense—and no sooner had review copies been sent out than a journalist, Hans Haider, prepared a list of the persons parodied in the book to facilitate their retaliation in the courts. For a time, sales were embargoed; Bernhard responded by forbidding his long-suffering publisher, Siegfried Unseld, from distributing any of his books in Austria. This affair—eventually settled, with no contrition on Bernhard’s part—was one in a long list of calculated public provocations, from his public condemnation of Austria’s stupidity upon receipt of the Austrian State Prize to his swan song, the play Heldenplatz, a denunciation of the author’s countrymen so relentlessly vilifying that on the day of the premiere, protesters deposited a load of animal manure at the entrance to the Burgtheater.

Happiness and Love is the Temu version of Woodcutters, cringingly imitative but in all areas wanting. Bernhard’s antithetical parallelisms (“Her manner of eating, while hardly the acme of refinement, was not inelegant, whereas her husband’s had always been simply comic”), his avalanching repetitions, the lapidary rendering of simple declarations (“I have never been partial to savory snacks, and certainly not to the Japanese variety”), his autistic nitpicking over whether the actor from the Burgtheater had played Old Ekdal or Young Ekdal in the production of The Wild Duck—all of this is absent in Dubno’s self-promotion vehicle. Dubno borrows Bernhard’s sneering italics to hint at a higher, more authentic level of thinking and speaking to which her characters’ stilted commonplaces aspire, but her own voice is little more than the sound of pop culture, college-speak, and midwit clichés clicking against each other in the confines of two covers:

Most of the hippies became boring as boomers, but at least they were having a good time and not trying to make Hollywood films loosely based on their lives while they were high on acid in Haight-Ashbury. I don’t mean to fetishize living in the moment but it seemed to me like Eugene, Nicole, the actress were all living to prove that they had lived. And this, most of all, more than their unlived-in houses and their unread books and their unused minds, was why I despised Eugene and Nicole and these idiots I had managed to take a vacation from until tonight.

Dubno seems to ignore that Bernhard’s immense, even preposterous unfairness leaves no possibility for conceiving of what he’s doing as something other than the artistic magnification of pure, unhinged scorn. No one with any judgment would accept as genuine his vicious verdicts on Doderer (“boring”), Heidegger (“ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow”), or Goethe (“stunted dachshund from the Frankfurt suburbs”); indeed, the targets of Bernhard’s ire are almost interchangeable from book to book. Dubno’s narrator, however, as a “good judge of who deserved poor treatment,” harnesses her “intelligence” and “quick wit” to dictate who is brilliant and who is stupid, what is cultured and what is vulgar, with only the haziest explanations of why or why it should matter.

Two-thirds of the way in, the guests take their places for dinner, setting the stage for the climactic scene. Fans of Woodcutters will recall the magnificent peroration of the Burgtheater actor, who, insulted at his hostess’s question as to whether he has found fulfillment in his art, inveighs against her, her guests, the dinner, the theater, and Viennese culture, voicing his dream of going to live in “the virgin forest” and announcing, “the life of a woodcutter, that has always been my ideal.” Here, this is trivialized into the actress’s admission that she had been excited to come to New York, which she thought would be so much more sophisticated than Los Angeles, but actually totally sucks. What provokes her ire is an argument with the writer, Alexander—whose snobbery and shortcomings the narrator has already catalogued at great length—about the director of the actress’s current film, a man she deems “one of the few truly brilliant directors left in America.”

Alexander is indignant, and cites the director’s “well-documented rapes” before averring, “but that’s not my problem with him. I don’t think an artist’s work should be criticized based on its maker’s actions, but I do think it has become so easy to hide behind being canceled for violent conduct to avoid a rebuke of your art.” After an aside about how the narrator saw Alexander was justly dissed at a party for not reading literature in translation, and another about how he got her story pulled from “a well-respected journal,” she helpfully guides the reader through the currently-most-acceptable retrospective take on #MeToo:

Of course, some of the so-called movement did address the sexual violence that is an undercurrent in our society, but many of the subsequent lists were full of acts, that, though they were undoubtedly uncomfortable and unpleasant, I felt amounted to little more than regrets, regrets for interactions that women had played an active part in and now wished they could suddenly take back.

The actress describes how she scrolls through the social media profiles of her friends in Denver, where she grew up, and dreams of opening a shop that sells “pretty, simple, obvious dresses that make regular women feel beautiful.” Her words and her vigor inspire the narrator so much that she calls the actress her hero, and they sustain her courage and good cheer as the festivities descend into chaos; hearing Eugene, Nicole, and Alexander characterized as “nonentities” allows the narrator to break free of them. As she walks home, she realizes she has begun to meditate, following the prompt of her yoga teacher in London who encouraged her to send good wishes toward those who need them in her mind. In what I believe is meant to be an amusing finale, she thinks “happiness and love” about Eugene, Nicole, and Alexander, then wishes them “a painful bout of syphilis,” “a catastrophic opening,” and “another tepidly reviewed book,” respectively, then repeats the words “happiness and love” once more.

A novel’s job is to achieve linguistic or stylistic distinction or, barring that, to tell a good story. A narration of nothing in a degraded paraphrase of someone else’s style ought, rather than a novel, to be termed a cultural intervention. Just as NFT and crypto coins have no substance, but are empty reference points around which money can be accumulated, so this sort of literary fiction has despaired of literary ends, opting instead to peddle highbrow-coded, cachet-laden nullities that appeal to the lower strata of the online blather machine. While writing this, I took, as I often do, a look at the Goodreads reviews of Dubno’s book to see if anyone had sniffed out virtues I had missed. One of the top entries characterized it as “basically 200 pages of main character talking mad trash on some seriously pretentious tricks. Then another baddie comes in with fire and a mic drop.” This, I guess, is what we’re going for now. If that is the case, then bravo.

A book of another order, one with clear aesthetic aims pursued with curiosity and sensitivity, is Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which draws on Georges Perec’s Things. It is not so much a remake as one of those sequels released decades later, situating the same protagonists in a changed world. It’s a conceit that might easily have gone nowhere: drawing on Perec’s prestige to churn out another flimsy novel about liberal malaise, but with references to remote work, ketamine, and TikTok to make it palatable for the kids. Thankfully, Latronico has done something less blustery but more sophisticated, in a humane, precise, and attentive prose that recalls the Marcovaldo stories of Italo Calvino (credit here to his translator, Sophie Hughes, whose details are clear, often radiant, in a smooth, harmonious English, neither British nor American, that is ideally suited to protagonists whose origins and allegiances have been filed away until they are no longer people from anywhere).

In Things, a couple, Jerôme and Sylvie, are twentysomething market researchers, underpaid, but flush with leisure time. They aren’t rich, but they want to be; they know how to spend their money, where to drink, what to eat, what magazines to read and what movies to see. Briefly, the turmoil of the Algerian War inspires “automatic allegiance to moral imperatives of a very broad and unspecific kind,” and they join their local Anti-Fascist Committee, attending protests, putting up posters, and occasionally serving as lookouts. It doesn’t add up to much, and when their activism wanes, what they notice most is nothing to do with the cause, but the weight of time past:

Some days they felt as if they still hadn’t begun to live. But the life they were leading came more and more to seem to them a precarious and ephemeral thing; and they felt drained of strength, as if their waiting, their hardships, their pinched budgets had worn them out, as if all of it—unsatisfied desires, imperfect pleasures, wasted time—had been in the natural order of things.

Their response, after a long spell of anomie and the collapse of most of their friendships, is to escape to Tunisia, answering a job posting for teachers in Le Monde. They dream of “the sun, the blue Mediterranean Sea, the prospect of a different life, of a real departure” in the capital; instead, Sylvie is assigned a job in Sfax and Jerôme in Mahares. They have never heard of either city, but they choose the former, and live modestly on her salary. They are “absolutely alone” and fritter their time away taking walks, watching movies, and solving crossword puzzles. Strained by the “quiet and very gentle tragedy . . . entering the heart of their decelerating lives,” they will return to Paris, to their old friends and old haunts, and with time, their luck will turn. They will receive an offer to take over a firm in Bordeaux that will make them comfortable, if not wealthy; at last, they will have enough to afford “their chesterfield settee, their armchairs in soft natural leather as stylish as seats in Italian racing cars, their rustic tables, their lecterns, and their fitted carpets, silk rugs, and light oak bookcases.”

Perec had friends who had worked in market research, had studied sociology himself, and sensed, in the words of his biographer David Bellos, “that life can be grasped at the level of the things that people want, and acquire, and put on their shelves; or the realization that the everydayness of objects does not deprive them of meaning, or of passion.” Perec saw happiness as a novel and historically bounded concept inseparable from material conditions, and in contrast to Sartre, whose memoir The Words portrays the unfolding of a great mind driven by inner motive force, he wanted to show how external objects radiate promise that shapes people’s inner lives. It is a Marxist-sounding project, and the novel ends with a quotation from Marx; what separates it from crude polemic is Perec’s empathy and his interest in the subtle relations his characters develop with the beacons of their desire.

Latronico’s version opens in a sunny apartment in Berlin with “honey-colored floorboards.” There are plants, “a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat.” In the kitchen are subway tiles, wooden surfaces, mason jars of spices, cast-iron pans. A home office for two accommodates wireless keyboards, monitors, and headphones. Elsewhere are resistance bands, a yoga mat, a Kraftwerk LP, Edison bulbs, and copies of Monocle and The New Yorker. It is the home of Anna and Tom, two “creative professionals” from “a large but peripheral southern European city.” Though they had managed to use the computer skills honed in their adolescence to get gigs building websites or designing logos back home, “they weren’t free to invent themselves, or rather, they weren’t free to reinvent themselves,” and for this reason, they migrate north to the German capital, which is quickly gentrifying and internationalizing but is still cheaper and more welcoming than the country of their birth. What Berlin offers them, above all, is something to care about and something to do: a stand-in for a hobby, a family, a faith, a creed. In this way, for a time, life’s questions are resolved, or rather collapsed into which gallery opening to attend, which club to go to afterward, whether and where to do brunch.

Their language is non-native English, like that of their Greek, Spanish, and Italian friends; they get their news from The Guardian and the New York Times, and events in America concern them more deeply than goings-on in Europe, which in a sense they’ve abandoned for a supranational hybrid place, one where online and offline merge in a radical flattening—a place full of endless suggestions and stimuli that never coalesce into meaning:

An egg became more famous than the pope. A highly contagious virus raged through West Africa. A billionaire poured a bucket of ice on his head. A fashion brand exploited East Asian sweatshop workers. A young woman recorded all the times she was catcalled. Two African Americans were killed by police. A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared.

Anna and Tom are content, though “they worried they were content being merely contented.” And yet eventually, like a person scrolling for hours on Netflix without finding anything worth watching, they feel the mass of opportunities before them collapse into a smooth mass of not-quite possibility. They are enervated, particularly in the moral sense, and try to relieve the itch, identifying as feminists and debating the fallout over Justine Sacco’s viral tweet about Africa (“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS! Just kidding. I’m white!”). The imperative to cultivate dissatisfaction, to replace one product with another—ceramic knives with Vietnamese steel, Vietnamese steel with forged stainless—reveals itself to be less a march toward perfection than the metabolism of the market of which they form part. Then, in September 2015, change comes in the form of a viral photo of a drowned Syrian migrant boy washed up on a Turkish beach.

Fired by “the feeling that something was taking place around them that they didn’t want to miss,” Anna and Tom collect donations for the refugees, repost the photos of rescue ships, go a few times to the temporary camp at Tempelhof airport, where their help isn’t really needed. Their German isn’t good enough for interpreting; they know no Arabic at all. So many filmmakers and artists are crowding the facilities to try and turn the refugees’ stories into art that the NGOs instruct volunteers to leave their smartphones at home. An outbreak of bedbugs puts an end to the clothing drive, and finally, Tom and Anna give up, reassuring themselves that “there would be other crises, in the near or not-so-near future, to which they would be better equipped to respond.”

All the while, they are getting older. Friends move away, young people move in, a better-heeled creative class shows up with funds to buy property rather than rent. “The increasingly feverish pace of change in the city was turning against the people who had fueled it.” Anna and Tom try traveling; they try a move to Lisbon, the new it city, which has the same expats and the same oat-milk lattes but cannot give them back their youth. They gamble on Sicily, and the simpler, more authentic life it offers. The sea views don’t thrill them, though they look good on Instagram. They can’t afford anything nice, and the food is too heavy on carbs.

As anyone who’s lived in Europe knows, the true class divide for the young-to-middle-aged, now that almost all jobs are precarious and low-paying, is how much property a person comes into. With birth rates falling catastrophically, even many among the less well-off can count on inheriting at least one apartment to throw up on Airbnb. In this lottery, at last, Anna and Tom strike gold. As worries beset them about when and how AI will take their jobs, Anna’s childless uncle dies, leaving them a farmhouse he had spent his entire life renovating in view of a leisurely retirement on the coast. They visit, and see it instantly not for what it is or could be, but for the visions it will inspire in others when photographs of it are posted online.

Rafael Chirbes’s insight that bohemian culture, which views itself in opposition to consumerism, is actually a propaedeutic for consumerism in its most refined and costly forms, applies to Anna and Tom, who use their Berlin connections and their long-cultivated internationalist taste to turn the place into a bed and breakfast, filling it with artwork and artisanal furniture, raw bed linens, enamel dinnerware. They offer a photographer friend a three-night stay in exchange for promotional images. When they are uploaded—the glass of orange wine, the sourdough, the reading nook with a fireplace—it as if the keystone has slid into the arch, and at last their vision of perfection has been achieved.

It is often social concerns, or the desire to appeal to them, that motivate the artistic redo: the now-forgotten Lo’s Diary by Pia Pera retold Nabokov’s Lolita from the victim’s perspective; Percival Everett’s Pulitzer prizewinner James purports to give Jim’s perspective on Huckleberry Finn. There is a charm to these efforts, even if they aren’t much to my taste, to the extent that they engage with literature as something shared that continues to speak to us across time. Hermann Burger decided, on the basis of conversations about Proust, whom he’d never read, that he could top In Search of Lost Time with his musing on cigars; few will accept that he did, not least because he killed himself in the process, but there remains much that is awe-inspiring in his catastrophic failure. Insurrecto, Gina Apostol’s complex engagement with the novels of Philippine nationalist José Rizal—which mingle criticism, parody, and reverence—is a work of true, almost fiery brilliance.

Whether or not they’ve succeeded or failed, these are works of ambition. But it is hard to imagine Dubno thought she could best Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and hard to see what she thought she might add to it. In the end, she seems to have found it sufficient to ask, What if this was the same, but about me? As a musing, this may be pleasureful, but why it should interest others is difficult to say. With Perfection, Latronico’s aims are modest, but they require a light and sure touch, which he has mastered, and Perfection takes the most respectful approach to adaptation as a genre: it is an homage that summons a great writer’s ghost to share bittersweetly how right he was.