A discussion with David Desmond  

Everyone would benefit from psychological training because we're all obligated to deal with other people in our everyday lives. In a small town like Palm Beach, there's nowhere to hide, so eccentricities become much more obvious, and they're only magnified by the excesses of money and free time that are so common. With the benefits of my training, I'm able to enjoy watching all of the quirky people who live around me without becoming one of them.

How long have the ideas for the novel been in your head and where did you find the inspiration to write it?

I've always been an avid reader and it has been my goal to become a novelist since I was a child. I spent many years writing articles for medical journals based on my research into stroke and Alzheimer's disease, but scientific writing tends to be quite formulaic and restrictive. When I decided to write about Palm Beach and Paris, two places that fascinate me, I felt liberated and the book basically wrote itself.

Was there a situation that you witnessed or something that happened to you that triggered an idea for a plot?

The plot and the settings of The Misadventures of Oliver Booth were certainly influenced by my personal experiences. In fact, the truth about Palm Beach is actually much stranger than anything that I could invent. Palm Beach is a writer's dream.

What's so interesting about Palm Beach and Paris? Why are these two cities highlighted in your novel?

I live in Palm Beach and in Paris and I love them both, although Palm Beach has better weather and Paris has more restaurants. The book is about people, though, and not really about places, and I could just as easily have set the book in Palm Springs and London or Santa Barbara and Rome. Every wealthy community has its own Worth Avenue, for example, and my focus is less on the high-end stores and restaurants that can be found there than on the behavior of the people who seek them out.

As evident in America's TV viewing, the public is fascinated by interior decorating. What do you think your readers will come away thinking about that profession?

Like any profession, there are both good and remarkably bad interior designers. Oliver Booth, of course, is utterly lacking in any decorative skills, and his work is further compromised by his unrelenting focus on the bottom line. On the other hand, Bernard Dauphin, the young waiter whom he hires to serve as his assistant while shopping in Paris, ultimately moves on to manage a very successful and well-respected antique store. Much like choosing a doctor, one should choose an interior designer with care because you'll be exposed to the results of their work during most of your waking hours. I mean, do you really want to spend your evenings reading under a Philippe Starck floor lamp made out of a gold-plated M-16 rifle?

Do your neighbors and friends worry that they are characterized in your book? Should we be reading between the lines to try to identify real people?

Many people have asked me to reveal the true identities of the characters in Oliver Booth, but they're simply composites of many people that I've run across in Palm Beach and Paris. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The situations that title character Oliver gets himself into are laugh out loud funny, but the reader comes away feeling that he has received justified payback. Do narcissistic people like Oliver tend to be foiled by their own behavior?

It's difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for the true narcissists among us because in their subconscious we simply exist to serve as extensions of themselves. Even though we should understand that narcissism is a method for coping with subconscious feelings of worthlessness, I don't think there's anything wrong with finding a little bit of humor in the pratfalls of a person who believes that all of his problems are the other guy's fault.

What do you want your readers to conclude after reading about the misadventures of Oliver Booth?

Although I intended for The Misadventures of Oliver Booth to be an entertainment rather than a self-help book, it could certainly lead people to reflect on their life priorities and the questions that really matter, such as, "Do I really need to buy a Lamborghini if the speed limit is 30 miles per hour?"

Your next novel follows Oliver to NYC and Palm Beach and it is set in the world of real estate. Do you intend to create a series of novels with this not entirely sympathetic creature? How will he make the leap from being an antique dealer / interior designer to the world of real estate?

It's fun to place Oliver Booth in challenging situations and then punish him for his arrogance, but he's also the vehicle through which I'm able to explore the different aspects of society that interest me. Real estate is actually not that far afield from the antique business. Both require salesmanship, particularly when one's product is not particularly impressive, and, in addition to many reputable practitioners, both attract some truly slippery and sneaky characters, like Oliver Booth.

You have a famous uncle whose name is synonymous with New York. Will your next book pay homage to Donald Trump or your family's background? Are you going to show the funny side of that industry too?

My family has been very successful in real estate, but the sequel to The Misadventures of Oliver Booth has very little to do with the nine-story red-brick buildings that my grandfather constructed all over Brooklyn and Queens or the towers that Donald built later. Instead, it satirizes the world of high‑end co-ops on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with their unrealistic criteria for social and financial acceptability and the sometimes arbitrary manner in which they wield their power. Much like certain Palm Beach clubs, don't you think?