Parties

Carl Van Vechten's famed satirical portrait of upper-bohem New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs. David Westlake has killed someone, and his wife, so she herself reports, has committed suicide! Hyperbole, the reader quickly perceives, is the common language of these sozzled socialites who spend their nights in Harlem speakeasies and their days in drunken gossip. But people actually do die in this comic novel, and beneath their forgetfulness is an emptiness and longing as deep as that of Hemingway's "lost generation."