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The Firebrat
In this introspective work we watch brilliant, outspoken Elliott try to come to terms with his rapidly changing life. It is time for Elliott to grow up, in spite of his all-out effort to have the world "his way". He must find a way to integrate into his the disappointment of his love interest's outrage when Elliott writes a short story about him that not only outs him, but paints him as self-absorbed; the slow, agonizing (and irritating) death of his best (and only) friend; the inescapable truth that his literary hero is not all Elliott has made him out to be; and the alarming outcome of his infatuation with flying. Elliott is running out of charm and his denial is being quickly obliterated. All that's left is his spoiled, petulant, witty, intelligent, and highly amusing persona. But will that be enough to save him? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it is definitely enough to keep a reader turning pages far into the night.
- GenresFiction
246 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2003
10 people want to read
About the author
David McConnell
37 books13 followersDavid McConnell has been writing and thinking about the written word his entire life. Self-taught, he created his own curriculum of ancient literature. His fictionalized memoir, The Firebrat, came out in 2003 and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award.
He is now working on a true crime non-fiction project entitled GAY PANIC: True Stories of Straight Men Who Kill Gay Men. He is also continuing a twenty-year project, an unfinished poem in an invented syllabic form, The Square.
McConnell was born in 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, attended The Hawken School, Choate/Rosemary Hall, Shaker Heights High Schooland lasted a year at Columbia College in New York City.
While living in upstate New York, he published a literary magazine with Nora Wright, the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney.
Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.
After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary math to prisoners on Riker's Island. He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse where he has been the host of countless parties honoring his many literary friends and their works.
Read more about him at www.DavidMcConnell.com"
He is now working on a true crime non-fiction project entitled GAY PANIC: True Stories of Straight Men Who Kill Gay Men. He is also continuing a twenty-year project, an unfinished poem in an invented syllabic form, The Square.
McConnell was born in 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, attended The Hawken School, Choate/Rosemary Hall, Shaker Heights High Schooland lasted a year at Columbia College in New York City.
While living in upstate New York, he published a literary magazine with Nora Wright, the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney.
Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.
After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary math to prisoners on Riker's Island. He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse where he has been the host of countless parties honoring his many literary friends and their works.
Read more about him at www.DavidMcConnell.com"
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 11, 2025
(stylistic corrections made November 2024).
Because I am going to say negative things about this novel I want to first say that I think David McConnell is an extraordinarily fine writer. I discovered him via his second novel 'The Silver Hearted', which I thought, and still think, is one of the finest novels I have ever read. Not long after reading it I read excerpts in 'Between Men' and 'Between Men 2', edited by Richard Canning from a novel in progress by McConnell called 'The Beads' which were even more powerful then 'The Silver Hearted'. Unfortunately years passed, nearly fifteen and I gave up hope of the novel appearing (see my footnote *1 below). But in June of 2024 I discovered that 'The Beads' was scheduled for publication in the autumn and it motivated me to finally read this, McConnell's first book.
I was not as impressed by 'The Firebrat' as I had expected to be, nor as impressed as many reviewers were at the time of its publication (2003), including GR authors Vestal MacIntyre and Patrick Ryan whose books I love and opinions I respect (if you haven't read anything by either of these authors I strongly recommend you make up that deficiency). One reason for my lack of appreciation may be due to reading it now rather than in 2003 because 'Firebrat' is an AIDS novel but more specifically an AIDS novel written in 2003 but set in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. When reading the novel now it was only because I am old enough to have lived through the entirety of the AIDS crisis that I could pick up the subtle pointers, which were probably much clearer in 2003, that the novel was set a decade or more earlier.
In recent years I have found myself reassessing so much of the literature with an 'AIDS' theme published in the 1980s/90s and early millennium years. I find myself separating out, if not the wheat from the chaff, then what will last as literature from what will be remembered simply as memoir or reportage. If 'Firebrat' had not been written by McConnell I doubt if I would have read it now. If in 2024 it was the first work by McConnell I had read then I doubt if I would be in the process of buying his latest novel.
Stylistically it is brilliant, but annoying as only a first novel by a precocious young author can be. The main protagonist, Elliot, is self absorbed, self centered and self obsessed and there is always the danger of confusing the first person narrator with the author particularly in a case like 'Firebrat' which was intended to be read, by those in-the-know, as a fictionalized memoir. Unfortunately it is also all too easy for an author to use the first person narrative to send off clever-clogs signals to his literary friends and associates who knew this was a fictionalized memoir. The result is an awful lot of showing off:
'A gibbous slice of carrot fell to the floor...' page 64
'boldly saurian, sniffling basset hound...' page 74
'A train's station's pestilential vespasienne...' page 22 (the old Parisian Pissoir)
'souvenirs entomologiques...' page 29 a book destroyed when the bathtub overflows
'L'Autrichienne...' page 141 (its use unconnected to Marie Antoinette or the film of that name but echoing its original use)
'The suburbs of Lisbon...' used several times as a place without meaning but why it should mean anything special I did not understand (maybe because I haven't spent time in Lisbon bars or rundown Sinatra palaces discussing poems by Pessoa - that may sound like sour-grapes on my part but it isn't.)
'Apoxyomenos' body...' page 83
'Goliardic sameness...' page 140
'An unidentifiable Haussmannesque etoile and boulevard nightmare...' page 172
If any other author had foisted the above on the reading public I would have tossed the book aside in disgust not because I don't enjoy pretentious purple prose, I have a fondness for it, but because it wasn't written to tell us anything about Elliot or anyone else in the novel but as ostentatious literary gewgaws to prove David McConnell's worthiness to his bohemian literary pals.
All of this is a damning way to introduce an author I want others to read, just don't read this novel until you have read 'The Silver Hearted' and 'The Beads' because this novel doesn't reflect the sheer wonderfulness of McConnell's writing and story telling abilities.
It might also seem odd that although awarding it three stars (for me a poor rating) yet still judging a book-without-which-I-cannot-live and well-worth-reading-again but that is the contradiction with the work of really first rate author, and David McConnell is a first rate author, that even things that they don't do well are better then the best of others. Everyone may not like him but he is for the ages.
*1 Anyone who reads anthologies from the 1980s and 90s will be sadly all too familiar with the experience of reading excerpts from works in progress that were either never completed or never found a publisher.
Because I am going to say negative things about this novel I want to first say that I think David McConnell is an extraordinarily fine writer. I discovered him via his second novel 'The Silver Hearted', which I thought, and still think, is one of the finest novels I have ever read. Not long after reading it I read excerpts in 'Between Men' and 'Between Men 2', edited by Richard Canning from a novel in progress by McConnell called 'The Beads' which were even more powerful then 'The Silver Hearted'. Unfortunately years passed, nearly fifteen and I gave up hope of the novel appearing (see my footnote *1 below). But in June of 2024 I discovered that 'The Beads' was scheduled for publication in the autumn and it motivated me to finally read this, McConnell's first book.
I was not as impressed by 'The Firebrat' as I had expected to be, nor as impressed as many reviewers were at the time of its publication (2003), including GR authors Vestal MacIntyre and Patrick Ryan whose books I love and opinions I respect (if you haven't read anything by either of these authors I strongly recommend you make up that deficiency). One reason for my lack of appreciation may be due to reading it now rather than in 2003 because 'Firebrat' is an AIDS novel but more specifically an AIDS novel written in 2003 but set in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. When reading the novel now it was only because I am old enough to have lived through the entirety of the AIDS crisis that I could pick up the subtle pointers, which were probably much clearer in 2003, that the novel was set a decade or more earlier.
In recent years I have found myself reassessing so much of the literature with an 'AIDS' theme published in the 1980s/90s and early millennium years. I find myself separating out, if not the wheat from the chaff, then what will last as literature from what will be remembered simply as memoir or reportage. If 'Firebrat' had not been written by McConnell I doubt if I would have read it now. If in 2024 it was the first work by McConnell I had read then I doubt if I would be in the process of buying his latest novel.
Stylistically it is brilliant, but annoying as only a first novel by a precocious young author can be. The main protagonist, Elliot, is self absorbed, self centered and self obsessed and there is always the danger of confusing the first person narrator with the author particularly in a case like 'Firebrat' which was intended to be read, by those in-the-know, as a fictionalized memoir. Unfortunately it is also all too easy for an author to use the first person narrative to send off clever-clogs signals to his literary friends and associates who knew this was a fictionalized memoir. The result is an awful lot of showing off:
'A gibbous slice of carrot fell to the floor...' page 64
'boldly saurian, sniffling basset hound...' page 74
'A train's station's pestilential vespasienne...' page 22 (the old Parisian Pissoir)
'souvenirs entomologiques...' page 29 a book destroyed when the bathtub overflows
'L'Autrichienne...' page 141 (its use unconnected to Marie Antoinette or the film of that name but echoing its original use)
'The suburbs of Lisbon...' used several times as a place without meaning but why it should mean anything special I did not understand (maybe because I haven't spent time in Lisbon bars or rundown Sinatra palaces discussing poems by Pessoa - that may sound like sour-grapes on my part but it isn't.)
'Apoxyomenos' body...' page 83
'Goliardic sameness...' page 140
'An unidentifiable Haussmannesque etoile and boulevard nightmare...' page 172
If any other author had foisted the above on the reading public I would have tossed the book aside in disgust not because I don't enjoy pretentious purple prose, I have a fondness for it, but because it wasn't written to tell us anything about Elliot or anyone else in the novel but as ostentatious literary gewgaws to prove David McConnell's worthiness to his bohemian literary pals.
All of this is a damning way to introduce an author I want others to read, just don't read this novel until you have read 'The Silver Hearted' and 'The Beads' because this novel doesn't reflect the sheer wonderfulness of McConnell's writing and story telling abilities.
It might also seem odd that although awarding it three stars (for me a poor rating) yet still judging a book-without-which-I-cannot-live and well-worth-reading-again but that is the contradiction with the work of really first rate author, and David McConnell is a first rate author, that even things that they don't do well are better then the best of others. Everyone may not like him but he is for the ages.
*1 Anyone who reads anthologies from the 1980s and 90s will be sadly all too familiar with the experience of reading excerpts from works in progress that were either never completed or never found a publisher.
Read
June 14, 2011McConnell is one of the true originals writing today. I've had the privilege to read three of his books now, and in each I was presented with a spectrum of emotions I was completely unused to seeing in books. He deals in the abject, the uncomfortable, the unexplainably eerie moments of everyday life. If Kafka were gay and living today, he'd sound something like this.
February 28, 2021
First off, this is really best read by gay men of a certain age as they will relate better. Although beautifully written, the story is challenging to read and enjoy. I like it, and I wish that there was more to read from this author!
May 11, 2009
Without having read this, I give McConnell five stars because he completed the book, is a dear friend, and because I hear from other readers that is it a 5 star.
March 10, 2014
One of my favorite novels, and one of the most genuinely eccentric narrative voices I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews