Robert Plunket

A humorous tour of the New York City gay scene in the early 80's. Quite instructive if you're an aging straight guy from the Left Coast like me. The jacket copy calls our narrator a "triumphant Emma Bovary for our parlous times", but the comparison ends at both being bored housewives. It's more like a fish-out-of-water, clash-of-cultures sort of thing as Mimi gets more and more enmeshed with a subculture she finds fascinating. It doesn't work as well as Plunket's first novel (My Search For Warren Harding) because that novel had more of a variety of characters and situations going on. I'm guessing that this one didn't sell well and Plunket sort of gave up writing. Too bad, because American culture has so much more of the material that Plunket mines in these two novels with comedic effect.… (meer)

My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunkett. I'm still reading this one, but by the time I'd got to page seventy and I'd laughed out loud at least three times, so it deserves special mention. Remember Warren Harding? The US president held up to American school children as our most corrupt, due to something called the "Teapot Dome?" (Whatever that was.) Warren Harding had a mistress with whom he fathered a child, and this book is about a young scholar from New York who rents the alleged mistress's pool house in Hollywood and dates her granddaughter in an attempt to dig up the dirt so he can write a book about her. Funny stuff.

Published in 1983 and set some time between 1977 and that year, it's charmingly dated. There's one scene where the protagonist puts together a bag of fake garbage, and later, an LA cop empties the whole bag before his eyes. My twenty-first century sensibilities were agog at this scene. First of all, the garbage bag: a brown paper grocery bag! Doesn't he know those things are like gold? Then, the garbage itself: glass bottles, a cardboard cookie box, a newspaper, a pornographic magazine. The protagonist is mortified when the cop exposes his Bound and Gagged magazine (he claims he found it in a telephone booth) but the modern reader sees the porn as a lesser sin compared to putting recyclables in the trash. And in California no less! Is there no limit to this man's depravity? I bet he doesn't even eat free-range eggs.

I don't know how My Search for Warren Harding ends yet (although a probable conclusion is pretty obvious) what matters is what happens to the guy, (one Elliott Weiner) along the way. This book has catapulted itself into a place among the books I reread when I need cheering up.… (meer)