Parties by Carl Van Vechten (1930)

This is most noticeably the novel of an alcoholic. Drink is the main returning motif, it is the currency of this novel. Set in the time of speakeasies, bootleggers and Harlem Nights for wealthy young white New Yorkers, it is perhaps the novel of all of Van Vechten's which tips its hat to Ronald Firbank, one of the author's fascinations, the most. One character, Roy Fern, is almost definitely a kind of warped celebration of him, with his strange intense effusions, glittering eyes, love of men, and waspish slenderness. The opening chapter is very Firbankian, with its short blasts of conversation and event in quick succession, leaving the reader to fill the narrative. Thereafter it settles into a more classically Vechtenian mode, with the sweet young things of the Jazz Age bouncing off one another in a variety of moods. The purity of the eccentricity of this one is new - notably in the character of the wild Simone Fly, whose standard drunken utterance, "Blaaaa!", and tendency to drop and smithereen her glass in her excitement while exclaiming at odd angles on barstools or on the floor is really fine. The open discussion of drugs (Roy Fern loves 'uppies', some call it snow) is also new. A novel which, while it hardly uplifts the spirit, is markedly clever, super-ready for a film adaptation, and only suffers from a rather whimpery ending.