Dramatic irony, or that which is unseen by a character but visible to the reader, creates the grounds for comedy as well as tragedy. In Robert Plunket’s novel Love Junkie, it creates the grounds for both. The book is set in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the AIDS era. Even in 1992, when Love Junkie was originally published, readers would have likely recognized the killer virus at the door that the characters of the novel—especially Mimi Smithers, a naïve housewife who mingles with fashionable and fabulous gay yuppies as well as a rougher set of artists cum porn stars—cannot see. The coming plague, which exists on the novel’s periphery, is heralded only once, about midway through, when Mimi notices a yellowed magazine clipping about a “new gay cancer” posted to the side of a community board on Fire Island. The clipping appears as a minor detail in an extended description of the Meat Rack, the infamous forested cruising zone, where Mimi happens upon some group fellatio, much to her horror. By the end of the book, though, the disease, while still unspoken, will have arrived with full force; the novel’s last scene takes place at a funeral.

The foreboding of AIDS becomes a tension, at times uncomfortable, throughout Love Junkie. But because the book is told from Mimi’s perspective, the depiction of an era of voracious sexual liberty and nearly sanctified aesthetic pleasure, soon to give way, lacks any sentimentality. Rather, it provides something like gravity to Plunket’s comic genius. With Mimi, he creates a character so dense with unknowing that it takes her a while even to recognize that she has entered into the heady world of gay subculture to begin with. A disenchanted housewife modeled on Emma Bovary and, as Plunket has stated, Dorothy Rodgers (the wife of the composer Richard Rodgers, who wrote a book on decorating), Mimi’s myopia infuses everything she thinks and says with a riotous sense of irony. Remembering her time in Iran, where her husband worked for Union Carbide International during the fall of the Shah, she recalls her difficulty in tracking down ham in an Islamic country (“as scarce as hen’s teeth”) for her “Persian Paella,” as well as her resolution not to let a terrorist attack on a Tehran department store dampen her will to buy things: “That’s what the terrorists wanted…. So I went shopping. It was a political act.”

After their stint in Iran, Mimi and her husband move to Bronxville, a wealthy suburb in New York’s Westchester County. The novel opens on a cocktail party that Mimi hopes will ingratiate her to the town’s high society; it’s held in honor of an arts council league presided over by none other than Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. But the gathering proves disastrous when it is overrun by actual artists: politicized Black lesbian writers, depressing middle-aged craftswomen complaining about their grants (“Either she didn’t get it, or she did get it but it wasn’t enough”), and pitiful administrators like the proprietors of a dollhouse museum and a children’s theater director with visible scars from a recent suicide attempt. The saving grace is Mimi’s meeting of Tom Potts, who runs an arts PR firm in Manhattan. Once the depression from the cocktail party begins to lift, and Mimi is well enough to… go shopping again, she reconnects with Tom in the city, at a store for those in the know called Hunting World that sells things like $500 canteens. She is struck at first by his sophisticated style of dress, then his witty repartee. To Mimi, Tom—with his knowledge of the minutiae of New York’s higher social strata, his fashion designer contacts, and his discriminating good taste—is “a veritable fountain of the sort of information” she’s spent her whole life searching for. Yet she continues to miss the cues that readers will have picked up on at least since Tom referenced the beach house he rents on Fire Island and the “health club” he frequents in Chelsea.

Mimi begins to work for Tom at his PR firm and, still oblivious, quickly falls in love with him. Neither Tom’s love of opera nor, more obviously, the soiled jockstraps that she finds in his desk (alongside a formidable supply of amyl nitrite, aka poppers) provide her with the necessary illumination. The gag continues until Mimi is finally “hit over the head with a club” when she sees a photograph of Tom and his boyfriend, Floyd, kissing. Once she becomes aware of his sexuality, though, she revels in being part of the “In Crowd” of “homosexuals.” Plunket makes a meal of Mimi’s explaining the misunderstood lives of gay men to the reader—she comically reinforces stereotypes rather than dismantle them. “If you are ever thinking of starting a business,” she offers after spending time with Tom and his friends at a cabaret bar, “open a place where homosexuals can gather in groups and sing show tunes. You’ll be taking home the money in shopping bags.” Plunket endows Mimi with a casual homophobia that sits alongside her blithe racism. “He was my least favorite kind of homosexual,” she says of a “clone” named Georgie, “the kind with no wit or taste. He was like a Negro without rhythm.”

Indeed, one point of a character like Mimi is to give voice to the implicit biases underlying societal divisions of sexual orientation, class, and race. Mimi spares no one, and with her Plunket cloaks, in audacious humor, what would otherwise be far too ugly to say at all.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a contemporary version of Love Junkie getting a pass today. In a New York Times article on the 2022 reissue of Plunket’s previous novel, his 1983 debut, In Search of Warren Harding, Jeffrey Yang, the poet and New Directions editor, admitted hesitation about rereleasing the book: “There were a lot of questions, like, do we dare publish this now?… But it’s so aware of what it’s doing, even though the character is so unaware.” In Search of Warren Harding’s narrator, Elliot Weiner, is a deeply closeted gay academic willing to do practically anything, no matter how cruel, to further his research on the former president. Like Mimi, he is also “blind and blindsided,” “prejudiced,” and “self-absorbed,” as the novelist Danzy Senna wrote in a new introduction. But Senna suggests that by encountering such a character, “we are freed from our own delusions that we are not all Weiner. That we are not all—somehow, someway—in the closet.” For Plunket, as much as Mimi is a canny construction and a fool, perhaps we can say of her what Flaubert said of Madame Bovary: C’est moi.

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Since his rediscovery over the last couple of years, much has been written about Plunket’s colorful biography and his decision, in the mid-1980s, to leave New York for the Gulf Coast of Florida, where he still resides, living in a trailer outfitted with voluminous collections of costume jewelry and Juicy Couture handbags (he has around 70). For many decades, he wrote a local gossip column called “Ask Mr. Chatterbox” for Sarasota Magazine and was on the ground as well to cover national news, such as the 2000 Bush v. Gore court case and the Paul Reubens (aka Pee-Wee Herman) porn-theater scandal.

Plunket started off as an actor; he worked with the off-Broadway group La MaMa out of college and appeared in films like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. It was through a theater-producer friend that his first novel found its way to the author Ann Beattie (she eventually blurbed it as the best laugh she’d had since reading Tristram Shandy). Beattie then passed the novel on to the editor Gordon Lish. Though he agreed to publish it, Lish didn’t think Plunket’s book should be counted as literature—but if it wasn’t literature, Lish also told him, its comedy was something “harder to do.” My Search for Warren Harding amassed a devoted cult following—Larry David was an enthusiast and, according to Plunket, invited him to write for Seinfeld—as well as much critical praise. Its success, while modest, cleared a path for the publication of Love Junkie almost a decade later, by which time Plunket had already moved away from the New York publishing world to Florida.

Plunket told an interviewer that “several ‘friends’ I’d acquired through the success of [My Search for Warren Harding] turned and ran when they read” his second novel. It’s hard to know if this was because of Love Junkie’s “difficult” aim, which Plunket described at the time as “figuring out how to impose AIDS upon comic material.” Or simply because the book is so flagrantly queer, so versed in camp, and so full of non-heteronormative sex—hardly mainstream fare in the 1990s, though Madonna acquired the rights to adapt the book into a screenplay, followed by Amy Sedaris. Neither option materialized into a film, though, and Plunket’s next books—one was a fictional memoir of a decorator named John E. Jones that included architectural drawings and photographs—were turned down.

In a groovier universe, Plunket would have gone on publishing novels in addition to his journalism (a collection of which would be welcome). As it is, the strength and singularity of the two books he did publish demand an accounting of their place in the American fiction of the 1980s and ’90s. Writing for Bookforum, Ed Park argued that Plunket’s style of comedic writing might be a missing link that connects the “breezy tone” and “witty condescension” of Charles Portis and the “sociological takes” of Don DeLillo to the virtuosically digressive, footnote-laden prose of Nicholson Baker. Another peer whose work helps explains Plunket’s is Gary Indiana, many of whose books also conjure a downtown scene of S&M, hustlers, class unease, artistic striving, and petty cruelties with a sharp edge of comic parody.

Love Junkie heads deeper into this territory when Mimi becomes obsessed with a porn star named Joel Sabinak, whom she meets through Tom. If, before this, Mimi appeared to be a fool, her desire for Joel turns her into a veritable masochist driven to more unsettling extremes. Of course, Joel has ambitions beyond his turns in porn films and his mail-order business, which sells his soiled jockstraps (like the ones Mimi discovered in Tom’s desk), beefcake photos, “Verbal Abuse Tapes,” and castigating letters to the subs he’s dommed. “What he really wanted to do was direct,” Mimi informs us. With her husband away at a new job in India, she’s free to dedicate herself to this ambition and Joel’s happiness, to the point where her life is “quickly absorbed into his.” But she still remains unsuspecting about certain aspects of her new milieu. Her slow realization that Joel’s reprobate girlfriend, Nanette, has taken her to a sex dungeon in the Meatpacking District is by turns wildly slapstick as well as disturbing—especially when Mimi runs into Tom there, who is now visibly sick with the as-yet-unnamed AIDS. In the same night, Mimi also inadvertently picks up a john with Nanette. Of her ill-fated attempt at sex work, she thinks: “I had no moral qualms about what had happened…. the real problem was yet to come. It was, quite simply, this: what would Joel say?”

What Mimi can’t see now is that she is being conned, used, and will soon be discarded. She funds Joel’s art-house porn movie, Circle of Confusion, and, predictably, the production runs into snags: “technical problems” with the camera that render an orgy sequence a “primordial stew” of dark “sensuous” colors (Joel concedes, “The orgy’s fucked”), as well as problems with Joel’s ability to “perform” under pressure. When the production then moves from a loft in Chinatown to Mimi’s house in Bronxville, her beloved dog, Baby, won’t stop barking and causing disruptions, so she takes it to a shelter to be euthanized. Upon her return home, she is prompted to fill in for a missing actress in a lesbian scene that also needs to be reshot. Though Mimi is at first hesitant, Joel promises to accompany her on a cruise if she complies. “I am lesbian,” Mimi keeps repeating, “I am a lesbian.”

The promised cruise drains Mimi of all her money, and the dalliance with porn has shattered the illusion that she’ll ever fit in with the snooty society of Bronxville. Mired in debt and with her husband soon to return from his station in Bhopal, it would seem that suicide, à la Madame Bovary, is her best and only option. But in the end, by way of a propitious disaster, Mimi is spared. Tom, however, is not. The epilogue of Love Junkie, which is set at Tom’s memorial, still contains plenty of humor, but Plunket lets the zesty one-liners that have buoyed the rest of the novel fade somewhat in its closing pages. In this clearing, it becomes apparent that the furious satire of the book has been, at least in part, a way to make its real-life aspects more bearable and bring us closer to dark truths that are easy enough to recognize. Not just the ridiculous lengths we go to in the name of desire but, more importantly, the lies we tell ourselves in order to live amid the suffering of others.

Mimi’s obliviousness to the world’s pain through her own limited experience and understanding can’t seem so far off for anyone who experienced, during the height of AIDS, the callous disregard of almost the entire nation to the agony of thousands. Like so many people who turned a blind eye when a whole generation was dying, Mimi keeps her eyes on her own prize. Tom’s death doesn’t galvanize her to anything more than the sense that she’ll likely supplant him as the head of his PR firm. She ends the book not on a note of loss; instead, she’s considering the many options her future holds. Despite all this, Mimi is never framed as a monster. But, as funny as she is, one suspects she’s not a harmless joke either.