Parties

Carl Van Vechten has long been one of my favorite writers of what I started a while back to call "nightlife lit"-- The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Berlin Stories, for example, as well as their more contemporary descendents, Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero. And Parties, Van Vechten's seventh novel, has always represented, for me, the pinnacle of his work (maybe it was for him too, since--although he lived another 30+ years--he never wrote another novel). To get an idea of the appeal of Parties, then, imagine all that witty, drunken dialogue from Gatsby or Sun, with the tragedy and despair not removed so much as played for laughs. Then imagine a light plot filtered through a cheerfully queer sensibility, with portrayals of gay and bisexual characters (including the main male character, who loves both his wife and a young male bootlegger's assistant) that are strikingly open and unquestioning for the time, as well as a sexual openness bordering on free love or 70s-era swinger culture. Add to this Van Vechten's vast awareness of the popular culture of the day, with rich references to advertisements, pop songs, architecture, dance crazes, and other day-to-day life in the Manhattan of the Wall Street crash and its immediate aftermath (the novel was completed in April of 1930). There's very little plot, per se. At the novel's center is David Westlake, whom everyone wants and who tries to please everyone. His wife, Rilda, is jealous of his escapades but seeks revenge with her own adventures. They and their friends drink a lot, go to Harlem a lot, and exaggerate their situations with flamboyant hyberbole (the novel opens with David showing up drunk at his best friend's door assuring him, "I've killed a man or a man has killed me" [1]; a few minutes later Rilda calls to announce that she has committed suicide). In the mix as well is a sweet, elderly German noblewoman who encounters a bootlegger by chance and finds that her prissy noble life can't hold a candle to watching drunken Lindy Hoppers in Harlem. The novel reads like utter fluff--"Sex and the City" meets "Queer as Folk"--but there's more beneath that cheerful facade. The darkness of the novel is played for laughs, but it is present. At one point, David hilariously doesn't recognize either of the women he's been sleeping with, and it's clear he's having full-scale alcoholic blackouts. Later, a fortune-teller at a party (where else?) gleefully shreds several characters' self-esteem, with amusing effect, but she also reveals that one has cirrhosis of the liver. And the surreally calm, elegant, 8-year-old son of David and Rilda asks one of their friends if he can convince them to stop drinking so he can see them once in a while--just until he's older: "Please remember that when I am a little older and can drink and go to parties myself I won't care what David and Rilda do, but just now it's pretty hard" (254). The friend passes this along to David and Rilda and they all laugh a