Worth seeking out. Very funny, in a nasty sort of way. A real send-up of L.A. in the 70's also. ( )

My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunkett. I'm still reading this one, but by the time I'd got to page seventy and I'd laughed out loud at least three times, so it deserves special mention. Remember Warren Harding? The US president held up to American school children as our most corrupt, due to something called the "Teapot Dome?" (Whatever that was.) Warren Harding had a mistress with whom he fathered a child, and this book is about a young scholar from New York who rents the alleged mistress's pool house in Hollywood and dates her granddaughter in an attempt to dig up the dirt so he can write a book about her. Funny stuff.

Published in 1983 and set some time between 1977 and that year, it's charmingly dated. There's one scene where the protagonist puts together a bag of fake garbage, and later, an LA cop empties the whole bag before his eyes. My twenty-first century sensibilities were agog at this scene. First of all, the garbage bag: a brown paper grocery bag! Doesn't he know those things are like gold? Then, the garbage itself: glass bottles, a cardboard cookie box, a newspaper, a pornographic magazine. The protagonist is mortified when the cop exposes his Bound and Gagged magazine (he claims he found it in a telephone booth) but the modern reader sees the porn as a lesser sin compared to putting recyclables in the trash. And in California no less! Is there no limit to this man's depravity? I bet he doesn't even eat free-range eggs.

I don't know how My Search for Warren Harding ends yet (although a probable conclusion is pretty obvious) what matters is what happens to the guy, (one Elliott Weiner) along the way. This book has catapulted itself into a place among the books I reread when I need cheering up. ( )

One of the funniest books I've ever read. ( )