My Search for Warren Harding

praise for My Search for Warren Harding “Robert Plunket is a genuinely inspired comic writer, and My Search for Warren Harding shows the results of that inspiration on just about every page; he has been blessed with that rarest of gifts, what Noël Coward called ‘a talent to amuse.’” — Jonathan Yardley, Newsday “With his infectious combination of satire, irony, and flat-out slapstick, Plunket contrasts the pretentiousness and condescension of the Ivy League East Coast with the infantile celebrity obsession of the West Coast and intermixes history with gossip.” — Victoria Patterson, Tin House “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system.” — Frank Conroy, The Washington Post “Wonderfully, sometimes painfully funny, a book that makes you hug yourself with delight, that brings you to the edge of your seat, then knocks you on the floor laughing.” — Geoff Nicholson “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time . . . a momentous book. Buy it, read it, underline it.” — Florence King, Dallas Times Herald “Plunket purrs right through this looney L.A. landscape . . . My Search for Warren Harding is as easy-gliding as a fresh lathering of Coppertone. Besides, a smile is just the thing you need to go with that great tan.” — Peter C. Wyckoff, The Houston Post “A classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.” — Michael Leone, Los Angeles Review of Books “In My Search for Warren Harding Plunket pushes his mouthpieces to such lofty and comical levels of unreliability that he may have succeeded in creating a whole new rhetorical category — the Oblivi­ous Narrator.” — James Marcus, The Village Voice “My Search for Warren Harding is the funniest thing to come along since Jeeves and Blandings Castle.” — Ronald Reed, Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Robert Plunket’s version of The Aspern Papers is a paranoiac Californian farce . . . a marvelous literary homage.” — Roger Lewis, The New Statesman “The most outrageously cynical and funny book to have appeared in a long time.” — Antony Beevor, Literary Review “A very funny novel.” — The New Yorker My Search for Warren Harding also by Robert Plunket Love Junkie Copyright © 1983, 2023 by Robert Plunket Foreword copyright © 2023 by Danzy Senna All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material: “That’s Entertainment”: words by Howard Dietz, music by Arthur Schwartz. Copyright © 1952 (Renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music “Sometimes When We Touch”: words by Dan Hill, music by Barry Mann. Copyright © 1977 Anthem Entertainment A, Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC and Mann & Weil Songs, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights for Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC and Mann & Weil Songs, Inc. administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Manufactured in the United States of America First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1568) in 2023 Design by Erik Rieselbach Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Plunket, Robert, author. Title: My search for Warren Harding / Robert Plunket. Description: First edition. | New York, NY : New Directions Books, [2023] Identifiers: LCCN 2023001715 | ISBN 9780811234696 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811234702 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Harding, Warren G. (Warren Gamaliel), 1865–1923—Fiction. | Presidents—United States—Fiction. | Authors—Fiction. | LCGFT: Biographical fiction. | Political fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PS3566.L798 M9 2023 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20230123 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001715 New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011 Contents Foreword by Danzy Senna Author’s preface MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING Landmarks Cover Foreword 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. We were in the worst of days — the depths of the prevaccine pandemic — and our world was on fire, both literally and figuratively. 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. Tory bellowed through the muffled fabric of her N95 mask that it was one of her favorite novels — and really fucking funny. I needed funny. 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. When I was done, I sat in a kind of silent, focused delight. 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? The jacket bio for Plunket’s second (and, so far, last) novel, Love Junkie, published in 1992 and also out of print, reads: Robert Plunket’s first novel, My Search for Warren Harding, immediately established him as one of America’s most promising novelists. Unfortunately, the