Firecrackers

Firecrackers centers around Paul Moody, a man who finds his life utterly tedious and uneventful in New York City. However, that is until he encounters the mysterious, yet exuberant, Gunnar O'Grady. Moody tries to uncover the mystery of his young friend, while also desperately seeking his own purpose in the world. Firecrackers is the least known of Carl Van Vechten's novels, probably because it has never been reprinted and all of the others have. Of the four novels that deal directly with what he called 'the splendid drunken twenties' in New York, Firecrackers was published at the heart of the period and comes closest to depicting the Jazz Age in all its variety. After eighty years, the novel will strike many readers as quaint or mannered or camp (or all three), but Van Vechten subtitled it 'a realistic novel,' and the hi-jinks from the period on which it reports are apparently accurate, although informed by a masked austerity. As early as 1925, Van Vechten saw the end in sight even if few others were looking ahead that far. Coming out in the same year as books as disparate as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, dealing with similar if markedly different milieus, Firecrackers bolsters our understanding of that strange decade. It extends the lives of some characters in Van Vechten's earlier novels, and it anticipates the frantic desperation depicted in his last one, Parties (1930), when the stock market crash brought the twenties to a thudding halt.Van Vechten, Carl is the author of 'Firecrackers', published 2007 under ISBN 9781595690685 and ISBN 1595690689.