Love Junkie [Paperback]

Robert Plunket (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1993

The critically acclaimed author of the cult favorite My Search for Warren Harding now writes a hilarious comic novel in which a suburban housewife falls hopelessly in love with a star of gay porno films. "One of the funniest American novels of recent vintage and a worthy successor to Plunket's first . . . (novel)."--Washington Post Book World.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The burning issue in this comedy of (mostly gay) manners by the author of My Search for Warren Harding seems to be "Can a 41-year-old housewife find happiness with a gorgeous 29-year-old porn star who sells his dirty underwear?" The more pertinent question for readers, unfortunately, may be "Who cares?" Mildly amusing at first, the plot soon becomes an uncomfortable melange of raunchy remarks and bad sitcom humor. After endless would-be-racy dialogue--most of which barely qualifies as single entendre --Mimi Smithers, a denizen of Bronxville, N.Y., with a lagging libido, offers her house and her money for the making of a dirty movie. Plunket's gag lines are either retreads ("I'm sure he was her husband--they weren't saying a word to each other") or sophomoric ("Her name was Nanette--or as I called her, No No Nanette"). Even Mimi's tangents have tangents; some are droll, but most are either too "in" or tied to her endless name-dropping. Since her coy first-person narrative is annoyingly inconsistent in voice and attitudes, empathizing over her escapades becomes increasingly difficult. But then, it's difficult to work up sympathy for anyone who has her dog put to sleep because its barking impedes a movie filming.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Mimi Smithers knew right from childhood in Lubbock, Texas, that she was destined for an extraordinary life--and she gets just what she's always wanted in this uneven, often sexually explicit, comedy of manners by Plunket (My Search for Warren Harding, 1983). Ambitious Mimi, a Bronxville matron who loves to shop, tells her own story, beginning with a disastrous party for an arts group at which Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III is the honored guest. Bored with suburban life and husband Boyce (who, for the necessary plot resolution, works for Union Carbide), Mimi tries analysis, but a chance encounter with debonair Tom Potts while shopping is more what's needed. Tom has his own firm and asks Mimi to be his assistant. Mimi, smitten by Tom, is thrilled, but Tom is gay, which takes Mimi a while to figure out (she tends to be a little slow), though that doesn't stop her from having fun as she accompanies him and his friends around 1980's gay New York. At a picnic she meets gay-porn star Joel, an ambitious hunk, who employs her to run his profitable mail-order business. Besotted, she funds the great porn film that Joel writes and directs, and gets to know a lot of lowlife people--but then the film flops, Joel dumps her, and Mimi's left with the bills. Rescue is at hand, however: husband Boyce, who's been working in India, conveniently dies in the Bhopal disaster. With the money Union Carbide pays out to her, Mimi can pay her debts, buy an apartment on Sutton Place, and, with Tom now dead from AIDS, set out to take over his job. ``It was going to be fabulous,'' she trills. An absurd plot, obvious satire, and humor more sleazy than black--plus a heroine who's just plain dumb, and unappealingly so. Thin camp. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Perennial (April 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060922265
• ISBN-13: 978-0060922269
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Second Funniest Novel I Have Read..., July 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Love Junkie (Hardcover)

...the FUNNIEST being Plunket's first novel MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING. This novel again will have readers laughing their socks off. Each page is more delightful than the one preceding it. Plunket really knows how to create truly eccentric (an not so likable) characters. But who said the hero (or in this case the heroine) of a novel has to be likable. Having lived and come out as a gay man in the 1980's in New York I can relate to a lot of the incidents and characters in the book. I've known my share of Mimis along with some of the others. A funny book that is hard to find but don't pass up the chance to buy a copy if you happen across one.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious View of Gay 80s NYC from Outsider's View, December 22, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Junkie (Hardcover)

This book is one of the 3 or 4 laugh out loud funny books I have ever read. I think it is best appreciated by gay men who lived through the 1980s and have a broad sense of humor.

5.0 out of 5 stars can't understand why this author is not more widely known, September 1, 2011

By 

Central Banks R *the* Problem - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Love Junkie (Paperback)

I bought this book, LOVE JUNKIE, because the author, Robert Plunket, wrote one of the funniest books I have ever read, MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING(originally published, I believe, as MY SEARCH FOR WARREN G. HARDING, which title I actually prefer). I am now in my mid-60s. I like to read and have read hundreds, actually probably thousands of books; I can't even remember all of the books I have read. I wish I had kept a log. Instead of watching TV or movies, mostly I read. So I am a pretty sophisticated and demanding reader and critic, is my point,and it is unusual for me to enjoy a book as much as I did HARDING. Being a depressive, I love funny books, and good humorous writing is hard to write and hard to find.

I wrote this review, (I know, seems bass-ackwards) when I had just started LOVE JUNKIE. I have now finished the book and wanted to put in a few more words specifically about it. Here goes: it was very funny, and very readable. I put aside my other reading, except for a couple of things, and read it through. Plunket is a really good writer and I would like to see him write more. However, in my opinion MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING is a better book than LOVE JUNKIE. It is funnier, and the author/narrator is a more interesting and believable character. Also, I liked the plot of HARDING better. I will say that I believe the author is probably gay and that a certain negative attitude towards central female characters does come through in both books, as does a certain 'bitchiness.' As a woman, I do want to note that here and not overlook it. Although he castes a rather cold eye on his characters generally, and does so very wittily, still it seems that he might be especially hard on the female of the species. Also - LOVE JUNKIE is R-rated in places, which HARDING is not. Actually LOVE JUNKIE has several pretty sexually explicit scenes, for instance, in gay S&M bars in NYC. I didn't find any of it offensive; in fact it was for the most part extremely funny. If Plunkett 'casts a cold eye' on most of humankind, well, for better or worse, so do I - though probably not as wittily or amusingly as he does. So that is my comment on LOVE JUNKIE. Basically I loved it and I still wish Plunkett would write more and I think his talent is under-appreciated. So - here is the rest of the 'review' that I wrote before reading the book!

Anyway, for me to remember a book as vividly as I remembered MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING is unusual. Recently, I decided to re-read it, just because I remembered how wonderfully funny it was. I wondered if it would still seem as funny to me now, in part because if anything I have become a much pickier and harder-to-please reader. I get bored more easily by a book. It seems to me that my standards are a lot higher. (Though I have never been a pulp fan or a fan of books written just to make money; I have always preferred more 'content' - books by authors who actually have something to say, rather than just wanting to make money. If one had to slap a name onto the 'genre' I like, it would probably be literary fiction, though I also read biography and some non-fiction for pleasure. (I also read to find out about important subjects, such as optimal diet, and fiat money as opposed to money of substance.)

But my point is that I loved MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING as much reading it all over again as I did the first time. Another thing that is unusual is that I actually remembered quite a lot of the plot. Normally if I have read a book years ago, my memory of its content is dim at best.

I really do think Robert Plunket is a great comic writer. And in my opinion, comic or humorous writing is the hardest to pull off. The book that is coming to mind now is Evelyn Waugh's DECLINE AND FALL. Waugh spoke well of P.G. Wodehouse, I believe, as a stylist. P.G. Wodehouse at his best can be very funny, though he has not worn as well (with me)as has Plunkett's book. A short-story gem by Wodehouse that I recall quite well is "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate." Years ago on NPR I heard some dramatizations of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster books that were superbly done. I wish I could find them and listen to them again. In fact they were my introduction to Wodehouse, Bertie, and Jeeves, and I am very familiar with those books. But funny though the best of them are, they have not much 'content.' Plunket's humor is actually less formulaic and has more depth to it, I think. (Wodehouse admitedly wrote farce, and wrote for money.) Of course, a short comic gem is Woody Allen's "The Whore of MENSA." Allen also wrote a really funny short article for the New Yorker about getting his kid into the 'right' New York City schools. I have tried to find that to read again, but haven't been able to. It was hilarious, as good as 'The Whore of MENSA,' I thought.

A book that has been on my mind as I write this is LOLITA. I am not saying that Plunkett is as great a writer as Nabokov at his best - LOLITA actually sort of stands alone, in my opinion. But of course it has its humorous side. It is a darkly comic masterpiece, both very funny/witty in parts and very tragic, that I totally love, adore, admire, and worship and have re-read more than once.

Anyway,I am just starting LOVE JUNKIE now (it just came in the mail today, in fact) and am finding it as witty and amusing as Plunket's first book.

Honestly, I am perplexed that his books were/are not more widely read, reviewed, and appreciated. I think they could have been big financial successes.

My guess is that how much a book is pushed and advertised by the publisher (and how favorably - and frequently - it is reviewed/mentioned in print) has a lot to do with its success. Marketing, in other words, can make or break a book. I don't know why Plunkett's books were not more aggressively marketed.

Re forgotten masterpieces, in their genre, I have read many excellent, wonderful, important books on 'politically incorrect' subject matter, such as CANCER WINNNER by Jacquie Davison and WHY SUFFER by Dr. Ann Wigmore - books which contain important information but were not reviewed or advertised by the publisher (due both to lack of money and also their 'political incorrectness') and consequently are hardly known and o.o.p. Murray Rothbard as a prolific writer on economics stands pretty much alone in my esteem, and yet most econ. students are never assigned a book of his to read. I doubt he is mentioned at all in universities today, except perhaps disparagingly, in passing; once again - the powers that be do not like his 'content.'

But Plunkett has no politically incorrect content, and I don't know why his books are not more widely known and enjoyed. If you love really truly funny, witty books, by all means read these two by Robert Plunket. If your library doesn't have them, they are worth buying. I just wish I could find more books as funny as these. And I wish Robert Plunket would write another book!