![]() ![]() He is still writing and very active in the Sarasota scene. I wasn’t even sure if - sorry, Bob - he was still alive.Īfter a few phone calls to Sarasota Magazine, for which Plunket writes a real estate blog, I sniffed him out. įull disclosure: years ago, after having read the book, I corresponded with the great author, who lives in Sarasota, Florida, but I had since lost touch with him. Plunket himself and interview him for LARB. She wrote a “Lost & Found” essay in Tin House about the novel and writer, and to complement her essay I decided to track down Mr. Recently, my pal Victoria Patterson read My Search for Warren Harding, and luckily for all of us, she did a little digging. His second novel, Love Junkie, published in 1992, is also very funny, but after that, Plunket’s pen came to a standstill. ![]() Nobody had heard of Plunket everybody loved the book. I have impressed it upon everybody I know. Yet the novel is more than his comic adventure Plunket lampoons the entire smog-riddled world of California dreamers, loonies, and layabouts the sole reason we find any substance in Weiner is that he's one step ahead - barely - of the flakes around him. (Does anybody read the latter anymore?) Our crumb-bum hero sets himself an objective and pursues it mercilessly, lawlessly. In many ways, My Search for Warren Harding is a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes and Smollett. The biggest joy in his life - besides Harding-ania - is Morris dancing, which he talks about without the slightest irony. He is also an obviously closeted homosexual who hasn’t the slightest clue - the book is written in first person - how ridiculous he is, which is, of course the great joy of the novel. He is scurrilous and cruel and belittles everybody he meets. It takes about a page and half to realize that Weiner is not only an unreliable narrator, but also total scum. To get close to her - and those letters - Weiner poses as a struggling student, moves into their pool house, and courts the obese and love-hungry single mother, Jonica. Plunket fictionalizes Harding’s lover as Rebekah Kinney, an eighty-something cripple who lives with her daughter Jonica in a run-down Hollywood Hills mansion. Apparently, intensely heated love letters had been exchanged between Harding and Britton, and our scholar, Elliot Weiner, is determined to lay his hands on them and thus secure his own academic fame. Full of bawdy details, the book became a publishing sensation. One of his lovers, Nan Britton, went on to write a best-selling memoir in the 1920s about her long-hidden affair with the president. Weiner is a specialist in Warren Harding, whom most historians consider one of the worst American presidents ever. Published in 1983, My Search for Warren Harding concerns the exploits of a preening New York scholar-cum-sleaze named Elliot Weiner. I’ve recommended it to everyone I know and even my mother finds it howlingly funny. I purchased a used copy, tested the waters, and was immediately engulfed in waves of diaphragm-clenching hysteria. What? And, who? Such was my reaction when the novel was first referred to me by the writer Robert Clark Young. Maybe it’s just me.Īnd then there is My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket. ![]() Books other people find funny (the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, for example) don’t make me crack a smile, yet I find Moby-Dick hysterical in spots. Catch-22 is one, as is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, maybe Portnoy’s Complaint or Slaughterhouse-Five. THERE ARE probably a handful - at best - of American comic novels that deserve to be considered classics. ![]()
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