Customer Reviews

Love Junkie

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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...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.

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.

I had high hopes for Love Junkie because My Search for Warren Harding by the same author is so funny, but I was sadly disappointed. I just can't seem to find the comedy in Love Junkie. How is it funny to create a pathetic, unattractive middle-aged woman and have a laugh at her expense? Most of the other characters are so unlikeable--Joel in particular--I just couldn't stand to read about them. And speaking of queens, Mimi herself is the queen of self-denial, but to the point that I was disgusted and not entertained. Meanspiritedness aside, the book reads like Robert Plunkett spent time collecting witty gay one-liners and stringing them into a story.

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!

The reviewer for Kirkus read the same plot as I did but managed to miss the fun. Sad for her.

Every page of this book has nasty barbs buried in it. There are so many, in fact, that though I've read this book three times, I can still be shocked by how blind, how malicious the narrator can be as she blunders her way to the top. Robert Plunket is one of my favorite writers. If you have a taste for sarcasm and awful behavior, if you can actually pay attention to what narration actually says about the character of the narrator which remains unknown to them, he might be one of your favorites, too.

Much Gay fiction is trashy. This is great fiction about trashy people doing trashy things. It is brilliantly, deftly written. It is shocking. It is appalling.

It is consistently hilarious.