My Search for Warren Harding

Robert Plunket
1983

My response to this book was a bit less enthusiastic than most of the reviews I’ve read. My main complaint is that I bought it and read it because everyone raved about how funny it was. I laughed once. This is very subjective, of course, enough people who have read more than I have and are probably smarter in general have described it as funny that I must be in a minority.

I almost put it down around page 200, during a Hollywood celebrity party scene that I thought was pretty flat. I think that would be a hard scene to write well, a party populated with actual celebrities, and Plunket did not write it particularly well.

The novel, which was based on Henry James’s “The Alpern Papers,” for me, may have had some pacing problems. The protagonist’s mission, the central plot line, is to acquire the correspondence between Warren G. Harding and his lover, who is an old lady living in LA. I wondered if maybe too much of the plot centered on a cast of characters, and their dramas, that did not figure into the effort to snatch the Harding papers.

More likely, the issue was not that the novel was overly digressive (which a number of reviewers liked about the book) but that the digressions were not particularly entertaining. There were a few plot cul-de-sacs that detracted from the narrative momentum. A few scenes and characters that dangled and did not fit into the story in a meaningful way.

Rebekah Kinney, the mistress, is an afterthought in the story, it might have helped to develop her more, and work her into the story more than Plunket did. There are a few tossed-off flash-back scenes about her time with Harding, but they come early in the book and are fairly brief.

It is not a novel of vivid details or beautiful sentences.

What keeps the novel going is the narrator’s sensibility (“arch”). His withering commentary is the book’s main course, but there were points where the insults, the cruel judgements, the stereotypes stopped being funny, or interesting. The novel is comprised almost exclusively of a deeply unhappy closeted man punching down. I don’t mean to imply that protagonists need to be likable, or that it’s not OK to write racist, homophobic protagonists … I don’t know, maybe it’s a challenge to make that type of person the protagonist in a first-person novel.

It may also have been the case that the characters were somewhat flat because we were seeing them only or primarily through the (flawed) narrator’s eyes.

It’s one of those books where the story behind the book — how it went out of print and then was rediscovered, the author’s biography, how it remained influential among a small but famous crowd — is more interesting than the book itself.

The book did have things going for it, or I wouldn’t have finished it. I don’t know that I would call it funny, but it was witty, and the concept is a good one, the premise. A gay Harding scholar mucking around in 1980s Hollywood.

At the end of the day, I’m glad it’s out there, and that it brought the writer a measure of fame and success, and I’m glad I read it.