A Supposedly Funny Novel I’ll (Probably) Never Read Again
“I find myself in a nightmarish situation, so nightmarish, in fact, that I realize it is exactly that—a nightmare.” - Elliot Weiner
I recently read My Search for Warren Harding, a novel about a New York-based historian who embarks on a quest for fabled presidential archives in shallow, glittering Los Angeles and disdains every person he meets on the way. He’s a back-to-school scholar struggling to get his first major post-grad finding after wasting a chunk of his adult life fundraising for a zoo. He appears to be gay and in denial and processes this by being as homophobic as humanly possible. He looks down on LA and celebrity culture but yearns deeply to be famous himself. He is in pain.
It could be a moving yet comical portrait of the inner conflicts and out-of-reach pursuits that make it so agonizing, at times, to be human. The narrator lavishes the story with so much outwardly-directed loathing, the obvious conclusion is that the person he really hates is himself. The book is marketed as really, really funny. It isn’t nearly funny enough to pull this off.
The problem is that every character except our antihero, Elliot Weiner — credit where due to author Robert Plunket: that’s a good New York historian name — is flat. Weiner himself has approximately one additional dimension (secretly gay). The women are all hysterical and harebrained, and there is one who falls in love with him who Weiner portrays as exceedingly stupid. Though the character gets plenty of opportunities to complicate this characterization, she does not.
“Some loophole in the state educational system had gotten her into UCLA where she spent four years working on her tan in the sculpture garden and majoring in something called ‘Art’,” Weiner explains, in one example of the kind of bitter dad standup comedy vibe that characterizes much of the narrative. “Now if she’d a little more time hitting the books and a little less on carbo intake, she might have learned how to read and write.” (She is a poor speller and an overeater.) “God forbid she should miss a meal — General Foods stock would plummet.”
That’s all within four pages. You get the idea.
The novel was published in 1983, but the version I read was this year’s reissue with a glowing foreword by Danzy Senna, a writer far more accomplished than me who clearly has a different sense of humor. Calling the book “truly funny,” Senna writes, “Sensitivity readers, be warned: the protagonist of this novel, Elliot Weiner, is cruel, racist, fat-phobic, homophobic, and deeply, deeply petty.”
The latter point holds up. I didn’t consider myself a “sensitivity reader” going in, and wouldn’t say I was actively offended, just kind of displeased and then bored by the gratuitous heaping of slurs. (The book’s only out gay man is dubbed with a creative epithet that is literally just a definite article and a slur, which you can probably guess, used again and again and again.) Taken together, the characters form a composite picture of LA that appears lazily reliant on a New Yorker’s tired stereotypes: There’s a washed-up, alcoholic actress; her crazed radio DJ-slash-feminist-theater-collective-member daughter; a grasping aging socialite; a senile ailing heiress; a useless Mexican housekeeper; a hot trailer trash baby daddy; the aforementioned stupid woman who loves the (again, gay) narrator — you get the picture. Everyone is vapid and vain.
“Get me out of here,” Weiner thinks during the feminist theater performance, about halfway through the book. I think: same.
Maybe I’m just naive. I grew up in Massachusetts, live in New York, and gush butIhavealotoffamilyinLA whenever I get the chance. Maybe I have a romantic idea of the place and wince at this view of it through the eyes of such a total drag of an East Coaster. Or maybe I just want a novel that challenges my expectations a little.
The problem isn’t just that the characters don’t resist the stereotypes they illustrate seemingly at all. The narrator also goes off on pointless, rambling tangents, the purpose of which seem to be solely to expound upon his disdain for a particular ethnic group (or sexual orientation or gender). You don’t meet a single Puerto Rican character, but you do get Weiner’s thoughts on what’s wrong with Puerto Rican people. (Explained while he is apparently missing New York.) And while sure, this kind of rude, reductive perspective can serve as a vehicle for comedy, too often in this book, it’s the whole joke.
And Elliot Weiner himself is — you guessed it — a huge stereotype! Senna writes that “What’s wonderful about Plunket’s first-person narrator is how far beneath the surface his dishonesty lies.” Maybe I was just done the disservice of being warned, but Weiner’s sexuality seems pretty blatant, and told through the kind of overused tropes I’d expect to see on a 90s sitcom. (Apparently the book was an inspiration for Larry David and Seinfeld, so.)
Though disapproving of the choices around him, Weiner is acutely interested in celebrities and fashion. He can never get his personal style quite right, but he fixates on it a lot. (“Yachting outfits,” he tells us, before a fated outing that propels a lot of the plot, “I didn’t need.”) He hates women and is disgusted by their bodies, obviously; in contrast, he subtly describes the pouty mouth of one of the few other male characters as “sensual.” He appears to enjoy baking. Some of my favorite parts of the book are the occasional footnotes, most of which are recipes.
The best moments come when the narrator flashes briefly forward and reminds you that all of this is being told in retrospect. (There are a few separate, unexplained and possibly accidental occurrences where the narrative, told chronologically, slips into the present tense without clear purpose, then reverts to past in the subsequent scene.) My Search for Warren Harding is a book that knows it’s a book, or at least a manuscript of one, and Weiner’s footnotes and allusions to his publisher serve as metatextual clues that Plunket — somewhat surprisingly — executes well.
Those moments are a useful tool for communicating what I thought was Weiner’s funniest quality: complete delusion about the level of fame he’ll attain if he completes his historical feat. In one of the book’s best jokes, he imagines that he’ll be on the front page of the New York Times for his intervention in Harding Studies: three columns, with a portrait, but — modestly — still below the fold.
I’ll say this for the book: I did finish it. (I am not above abandoning something I’m not enjoying; there are too many books.) The first half of the story plods along, but somewhere about halfway through, in a sequence kicked off by the yachting trip for which Weiner is sartorially prepared, Plunket starts to nail the narrative tension. Even though I found the comedy mostly uninspired, I still wanted to know what would happen to Weiner, whether he would get his hands on those dusty papers. (I won’t tell, in case you want to read it yourself.) Like Weiner,* even though I was displeased with pretty much everything around me, I couldn’t give up the search for Warren Harding.
Maybe I liked it more than I thought I did.
Recommended if you like: watching bad movies for fun, unreliable (yet predictable) narrators, metatextual winks, slapstick comedy, a straight-up quest.
Not recommended if you like: sincerity, complex characters, innovative comedy, Los Angeles.
Alternate recommendation, if you want a satirical LA quest novel but richer and more creative: Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita
* I know it’s standard practice to refer to fictional characters by their first names, but this Elliot is such a Weiner.