![]() He moved to Florida in 1985, leaving behind New York and Los Angeles for the art scene in Sarasota. There’s little Plunket doesn’t love about his life or this part of the world. “My mother would have been horrified if I wasn’t in a house, but I just love it.” Plunket looked past his collection of Plasticville railroad houses, watching a neighbor tidy an already tidy yard across the street. “There’s an element of shame for many people, living in a trailer park,” Plunket said, resting his feet carefully on the tiniest slice of an oversized mint-green leather ottoman, the rest of which was taken up by Meatball. Plunket’s own trailer isn’t the vintage toaster-shaped style he loves, but he has made his manufactured home into something wonderful-a sort of double-wide ocean liner, with paintings of ships and port scenes on the walls and a carefully curated selection of cruise furniture throughout the house, including a prized table from the S.S. ![]() Imperial Lakes Estates is just off I-75, but its three hundred or so mobile homes look like they are trying very hard to ignore the interstate and stay put: front porches adorn some of them, huge carports and garages are attached to most of them, fat palm trees and shapely boxwoods line almost all of the sidewalks and driveways. Plunket settled into his current trailer park, a fifty-five-plus community, after losing his previous trailer during Hurricane Ian. This month, New Directions reissued his hilarious début novel, “ My Search for Warren Harding,” forty years after its initial appearance, and the publisher has already committed to reprinting his even more audacious second book, “ Love Junkie.” Plunket is calling all this hoopla his “resurrection,” because, like Norma Desmond, he dislikes the term “comeback.” But it might also be described as a belated coming-out party: the introduction to broader society of one of America’s funniest, gayest writers. Now, though, at seventy-eight and very much alive, Plunket seems poised to find the audience he’s long sensed he deserves. Yet, for almost his entire career, the writer remained a cult favorite without much of a cult. In fact, his admirers include not only literary rock stars such as Frank Rich and Gordon Lish but literal rock stars such as Madonna and star-stars such as Larry David and Amy Sedaris. Plunket last published a novel more than three decades ago, and for years he’s been living very far from the limelight, in various trailer parks around the west coast of Florida-most recently in Palmetto, with the man he considers his adopted son, Tom Cate, and their pug, Meatball, whom they rescued from what Plunket describes as a lesser trailer park in Orlando. “I just always assumed I’d be dead when it happened.”įor a long time, that seemed like a reasonable prediction. “I always knew I’d be famous,” he told me. Many of these theories are convincing, including the one Plunket has about his own status. Among them: why there are so many roundabouts in his adopted city of Sarasota, why lesbians don’t wear more jewelry, what’s really going on with Princess Charlene of Monaco, how the local neighborhood of Pinecraft became the Las Vegas of Amish and Mennonite Midwesterners, why Joan Didion’s posthumous fame has eclipsed Susan Sontag’s, and how Republicans could use grower-board appointments to profit when marijuana is legalized in Florida.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |