Robert Plunket, _My Search for Warren Harding_

FIRST PUBLISHED FORTY years ago, this novel's republication could launch it as a belatedly-discovered classic, à la John Williams's Stoner. 

To describe it briefly, it is Henry James's The Aspern Papers set in late 1970s Los Angeles, with the dark farce dialed up to 11.

Narrator Elliot Weiner (not Jewish, he wants you to know) is a historian and would-be-biographer of twenty-ninth President Warren G. Harding. He is hot on the trail of an amazing trove of documents belonging to Rebekah Kinney, a mistress of Harding who bore him a child and is now living in the Hollywood Hills. (Rebekah's circumstances blend those of Nan Britton, Harding's actual mistress, with those of the all-but-forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard.) 

If Weiner can get those documents, his career is assured, so he is willing to tell any lie, betray any trust, and manipulate any friendship to get his hands on them. Ethically, he is even worse than the unnamed narrator of The Aspern Papers, although also more self-aware.

Weiner is also racist and homophobic, even though his own queerness is often discernible to the reader; he is the most despicable narrator, in fact, that I have come across in a good long while. Tarquin Winot in John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure could match him, perhaps. Weiner's tart observations on California, his associates, and his own projects are constantly amusing, however, and the consistent backfiring of his best-laid plans shows Plunket to be a master architect of farce. My Search for Warren Harding is a comic masterpiece.

I wonder if the novel will end up on syllabusses? It would be tough to teach, since Weiner is so awful in so many ways. Perhaps in fiction-writing programs, though? Given Plunket's stylistic energy and whiplash wit, the novel's influence could only be salutary.