There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are.
Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles. Weiner specialises in Harding, largely because no one else much seems to, and his plan is to somehow inveigle himself into Kinney’s favour and grill her, although he hears she is ‘real old, real mean and dumb – dumb like a fox’. There are rumours of a cache of letters – with luck full of pornographic detail.
The plot is taken from Henry James’s The Aspern Papers; and, as James put it at the beginning of that novel: ‘The way to become an acquaintance was first to become an inmate.’ Weiner and a co-conspirator, spying on the mansion with a pair of binoculars and a Polaroid camera, discover that a small property in the grounds – which turns out to be a pool house – is vacant and free to rent.
We soon realise that the narrator is a jerk. Of his only other competitor, he says: ‘I will be the first to admit that [his] contributions to Hardingania have been tremendous, and that the charges of speciousness that are occasionally levelled against his work are largely unmerited.’
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