Whatever mischief he’s up to, he says, “it was Mrs. In the novel’s opening, we find Weiner standing on a scenic lookout in Los Angeles with his friend Eve Biersdorf staring through binoculars at a large, dilapidated home in the distance. Sensitivity readers, be warned: the protagonist of this novel, Elliot Weiner, is cruel, racist, fat-phobic, homophobic, and deeply, deeply petty. Which is maybe why the novel, forty years later, feels so startlingly contemporary. Plunket’s book, in other words, emerged out of a culture of contradictions-a world of both hedging progress and conservative backlash, an America of trash and spectacle. The same year Reverend Jerry Falwell described AIDS as “the gay plague.” The same year Ronald Reagan decreed Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday and Michael Jackson moonwalked for the first time on national television. The same year Vanessa Williams was crowned, then promptly decrowned, the first Black Miss America. It came out in 1983: the same year the national craze for Cabbage Patch dolls reached its pinnacle. The author himself was just emerging from that era when he wrote the book. In Plunket’s retelling of The Aspern Papers, he sets his novel in late-seventies Los Angeles. I don’t think Henry James realized what he had done, or how well he had done it, which made my discovery even more exciting.” But a man who was just not heterosexual at his core. Now, not an openly gay man or even a consciously gay man. His relationships with all the women characters were those of a gay man. The guy’s gay! Of course! Now the book made perfect sense. I couldn’t figure out why until one day it hit me. Plunket goes on to say, “It was always one of my favorites, but most important, it spoke to me in a special way. The Aspern Papers, the celebrated novella published by Henry James in 1888, is set in nineteenth-century Venice, where an unnamed narrator seduces a young woman in order to gain access to her spinster aunt’s trove of letters by her dead poet-lover. “Obviously, it’s based on The Aspern Papers,” Plunket explains. In one of the only I could find-published by the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015-he explains the inspiration for the novel to writer Michael Leone. There are few interviews with Plunket online. He has also served on the boards of Sarasota AIDS Support and the Humane Society of Sarasota County, and is currently running for election to the Mosquito Control Board, District 6. Unfortunately, the promise soon faded, and he now lives in a trailer in Sarasota, Florida, where he ekes out an existence as a gossip columnist, covering everything from gala charity balls to KKK meetings. Robert Plunket’s first novel, My Search for Warren Harding, immediately established him as one of America’s most promising novelists. The jacket bio for Plunket’s second (and, so far, last) novel, Love Junkie, published in 1992 and also out of print, reads: I held in my hands one of the best, and most invigorating books I’d read in years, and certainly the funniest-and yet, how was it out of print? Why had I never heard of this novel before now? (Later I learned Tory had actually written an excellent piece about it for Tin House magazine in 2015.) Why had it disappeared so fully from the literary landscape? And what did that say about this literary landscape if it could bury a book like this? Most intriguingly: Who was Robert Plunket? When I was done, I sat in a kind of silent, focused delight. I opened the book a few weeks later-and despite my allergic reaction to the mold in the edition, kept reading for the next 256 pages. Tory bellowed through the muffling fabric of her N95 mask that it was one of her favorite novels-and really fucking funny. The copy of the novel that my friend, the writer Victoria Patterson, handed over to me looked the way we all felt in those days: yellowing, battered, dusty from too long in storage. We were in the worst of days-the depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic-and our world was on fire, both literally and figuratively. I might not have read a single truly funny novel that year if my friend hadn’t stopped by my Los Angeles porch one afternoon carrying an out-of-print copy of Robert Plunket’s comic masterpiece, My Search for Warren Harding. National Photo Co., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. President Harding with pet dog Laddie being photographed in front of the White House.
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