Elliot Wiener, the smug narrator of this sporadically amusing, faintly unpleasant first novel, is a young historian specializing in Pres. Warren Harding, desperate for an academic scoop; and he believes he has found it when he learns that Harding"s supposed mistress, Rebekah Kinney, is living in Los Angeles--in a "Classic Hollywood Spanish" manse. So Elliot talks his way into the house, meets the old lady herself (a crone in a wheelchair), meets Rebekah"s fat granddaughter Jonica. . . and is soon agreeing to rent the estate"s pool house for $800 a month. Thus ensconced, hungry for dirt, Elliot tries eavesdropping, with farcical results. He has an unedifying chat with the resident gardener, crude Osvaldo. He decides to make friends with Jonica--inviting her to a disastrous dinner party. (One of the guests, referred to only as "the faggot," calls Jonica "Miss Goodyear.") But then Elliot and Jonica do become chums: they go to a play ("Just eight ugly girls whining about rejection")--and soon wind up, to Elliot"s semi-disgust, in bed, after which much of the space here is given over to insult material about gross Jonica. ("My God, I could do about seven hours on her eating habits alone. . . . Sex with Jonica was a trial. . . I"d pretend to be delighted and try to keep from blowing lunch. . . .") By cultivating the foul Jonica, however, Elliot does learn that there"s a trunkful of Harding letters in the main house; so the novel"s second half involves some slapsticky efforts to gain possession of the trunk--efforts which end up in predictable irony when Jonica gets the wrong idea about Elliot"s relationship with her cowboyish ex-husband Vernon.