My Search for Warren Harding

by Robert Plunket

Book Overview

When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket's glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, "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"; Florence King at the Dallas...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081123469X
• ISBN13: 9780811234696
• Release Date: June 2023
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Inspired Lunacy.

This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. It is a blend of slapstick, gallows humor, and literary wit, the likes we haven't seen since Nabokov's Pale Fire, which this book nods to often, with its incorporation of recipes (cold squash soup, sour cream coffee cake), a hysterical acknowledgments page (where the character complains about the Foundation that has provided his grant money but "disassociated" itself from his project) and footnotes. The plot concerns a desperate historian who moves into the poolhouse of Warren Harding's still-alive ex-mistress in Southern California in hopes of nabbing her trove of love letters. He then gets involved with the woman's daughter, an obese woman who falls immediately in love with him, and pure mayhem ensues, including a disastrous excursion on a yacht that involves the coast guard and a giant canvas diaper. No description can do this hilarious scene justice. Plunket's comic voice, his riffs on the characters he meets ("I knew right away I wasn't going to like the play. No plot, no jokes, and God knows, no stars. Just eight ugly girls whining about rejection. Well, I'll say this for them--they looked like experts on the subject.") are laugh-out-loud funny, and very un-P.C. Jonathan Yardley listed this book as one of the top five comic novels in America, and he's right. There is no book like it.

The funniest book I have ever read!!!!

I have read this book at least 6 times and each time I have enjoyed it more. Definitely one of those books where you can't help laughing at loud. I first discovered the book shortly after it was published. I was browsing one evening at the great, old (and now, alas, departed) Doubleday Bookstore at 58th & 5th in Manhattan. The title just jumped out and me and I knew I had to read this book even though I knew nothing about it. I had been living in NYC for about 4 years at the time and had only visited LA once for about a month in the late 70's. Plunkett must have lived there at about the same time because everything was so recognizable. I understood how out-of-place a New Yorker can feel in the land of swimming pools and movie stars. My job transferred me to Los Angeles in 1991 and I read the book again. It resonated even more for a recently transplanted New Yorker. Now I've lived in Los Angeles for eight years (only one year shy of my New York experience). I recently pulled my well-worn copy of the book off the bookshelf, dusted it off, and re-read it. The book is as funny as ever but there is something sad about it now when I realize how much not only I have changed over the past fifteen years but also New York and Los Angeles. As a New Yorker at heart I can daily find a hundred reasons New York is better than LA but at the same time LA is my home now I can't ever imagine myself living in NYC again. This time I read the book not as a New Yorker laughing at Los Angeles but as a Los Angelo laughing at a New Yorker laughing at LA. How the times change. Still, this is the best and funniest book ever written about the differences (both good and bad) between New York and Los Angeles. A must read for anyone who loves/hates either city.

Hilarious and Historical!

A friend loaned me the book about 8 years ago. I passed it on and eventually lost it. I found a few new copies a few years ago... I ordered it through a bookstore in Maine. They're hard to come by! I have since given it to many other friends who have said it's one of the funniest books they've read. It's one of my all-time favorites. Very sarcastic... and very entertaining. "Harding" has my highest recommendation!

Funny, funny--and there sure aren't enough of those anymore.

No book has ever made me laugh more. I've reread it more times than I can count. The Falls Church reader is right that the main character skewers everyone, but he's such a mess himself that it all comes out even. With all the sooo sooo serious books being published, thank goodness for this one. An all-time favorite.

One of The Best American Comic Novels Ever

My Search for Warren Harding is one of the best American comic novels ever. Robert Plunket has achieved a brilliant mix of satire, irony and flat out slapstick, while making pointed commentary on Los Angeles in the 70s, the difference between the coasts and the damage of gossip as history. I have read this book at least ten times in the past dozen or so years since it came out. It always makes me laugh out loud. That My Search for Warren Harding is no longer in print says very little for the state of publishing in America today.