Some time ago I was introduced, by two of my funniest friends, to Winner’s Dinners, a web archive of British film director Michael Winner’s restaurant column published in the Sunday Times between 1993 and 2012. Recounting meals taken everywhere from the Hyatt Carlton Tower to Sir Bernard Ashley (husband to Laura)’s Llangoed Hall, usually with signature expletives (“ghastly beyond belief”; “total, unimagined disaster”), Winner’s Dinners became the source of some of the funniest pieces of writing I’d read in a while. That was, until I came upon My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket, a novel whose main character, Eliot Wiener, seemed to have been plucked right out of the camp bourgeois world of Winner’s nightmarish English dining rooms.

The novel follows Wiener, a middling academic researching Warren Harding, the twenty-ninth president of the United States and a man infamous for his many extramarital affairs. In its opening act we follow the protagonist, decamped in Los Angeles, as he attempts to hunt down Harding’s now-octogenarian mistress, Rebecca Kinney (modeled on the ex-president’s real-life lover, Nan Britton). Aided by his friend, an older Los Angeles matron, Eve Biersdorf, our hero and his accomplice formulate a plan to get access to the former mistress: Wiener will ask to rent the pool house in the old lady’s crumbling Hollywood Spanish mansion. In aid of his mission, Wiener (who is, unbeknownst to himself, a closeted homosexual) begins to date Kinney’s granddaughter Jonica, a chronically overweight compulsive eater he openly disdains.

My Search for Warren Harding is an oddly digressive novel; this in part explains its cult status. Peppered with footnotes, recipes, and lifestyle and housekeeping tips that, as much as Wiener’s narration, round out his fictional persona, critics have compared Plunket’s book to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel written as an extended commentary on a poem. In a rare 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Plunket admits that his greatest inspiration was a Henry James novella, The Aspern Papers, which follows an academic who, with the aid of an older Venice matron, attempts to gain access to the letters of fictional Romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern from his aged former lover. To do so, he presents himself as her lodger and seduces her guileless spinster niece, Miss Tita. “It was always one of [my] favorites, but most important, it spoke to me in a special way,” Plunket said. “I couldn’t figure out why until one day it hit me. The guy’s gay! Of course! Now the book made perfect sense. His relationships with all the women characters were those of a gay man. I don’t think Henry James realized what he had done, or how well he had done it, which made my discovery even more exciting.”