Firecrackers: A Realistic Novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1925, and the subtitle is Van Vechten’s joke: nothing in the novel bears any relation to realism as the word was commonly understood. The characters are wealthy, idle, brilliant, and entirely devoted to the art of living as performance. Gunnar O’Grady, Paul Doolittle Moody, and their circle move through a New York of penthouse parties, masked balls, and improbable romantic entanglements, each more elaborately staged than the last.
The novel is plotless in any conventional sense — it is a series of social set pieces connected by the recurring characters and by the thematic preoccupation with artifice. Van Vechten’s point, insofar as the novel has one, is that for the very rich and very bored, life is a series of firecrackers — brilliant, loud, briefly exciting, and leaving nothing behind. The metaphor extends to the novel itself, which is designed to sparkle and pop rather than to illuminate.
What saves the book from mere frivolity is Van Vechten’s prose style, which is consistently witty and occasionally beautiful. He writes dialogue with the precision of a playwright, and his descriptions of rooms, costumes, and social rituals have the specificity of a social anthropologist studying an exotic tribe — which, in a sense, he was.
Collecting Firecrackers
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1925): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $20–$50