My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket

This madcap 1980s-era tale loosely riffs on Henry James’s THE ASPERN PAPERS. It's about the escalating hijinks of Elliott Weiner, an unscrupulous presidential scholar on the make who thinks he has a lead on Warren Harding’s reclusive long-lost lover. She is potentially hoarding a trove of salacious letters from the one-time commander in chief (“the shallowest President in history”) in her crumbling Hollywood Hills mansion that could make Weiner’s career, and his attempts to get his grubby mitts on them lead to one bad thing after another.

Danzy Senna wrote a terrific essay about this book for The Paris Review in 2023; it is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a choice bit:

"First-person narrators are often best as liars. They are most interesting when they lie to the world and they lie to us and they especially lie to themselves. Weiner is no exception. And there is a particular pleasure in this novel of witnessing the cracks where Weiner’s self-delusion runs up against the reality of his true self.

Weiner learns nothing from his journey. He keeps judging, keeps lying, keeps grasping, keeps being petty. Part of what’s liberating about writing awful characters, grotesque characters who do grotesque things and learn nothing from their journey, particularly for those of us who are writing from the margins, is that dark satirical comedy resists the autobiographical gaze. In writing a perceptive satire—writing monstrous characters on downward spirals that never reverse course —we resist the pressure to remediate and uplift. We reclaim our right as artists to simply fuck shit up and walk away, laughing."