My Search for Warren Harding

Eliot Weiner - snob, shameless opportunist, Morris dancing-obsessive - is on a mission. He has got wind of a trunk of bawdy love letters by Warren Harding, 'the shallowest President in history', now guarded by his octogenarian mistress on her crumbling Hollywood Hills estate. They could reignite his failing academic career - and there's no depth to which he won't stoop, no preposterous scheme he won't undertake, to get at them.
Robert Plunket's breakneck, unhinged romp through 1980s LA is a comic masterpiece.