Desmond, David: The Misadventures of Oliver Booth

Greenleaf Book Group © 2008, 224 pages

Oliver Booth is a pompous and portly antique dealer who is constantly endeavoring to ingratiate himself with the cosmetically-preserved ultra-rich of Palm Beach, thinking it good for business. But Booth inevitably fails, sometimes comically, both in his bids for societal approval and in business because his manner is irritating and he's a fraud: his shop is filled with Mexican knock-offs, and few prospective customers fall for the deceit. In David Desmond's debut novel--the first in what will apparently be a series--Oliver hires a certain Bernard Dauphin as his newest assistant. Bernard, unlike his employer, is both competent and scrupulously honest, and his qualities are recognized and rewarded, much to Oliver's dismay, by Palm Beach's dowager socialite, Margaret Van Buren. Desmond's novel follows the mismatched pair as they travel to France on Mrs. Van Buren's behalf to purchase antiques to furnish her guest house.

Desmond's book is mildly amusing, but never laugh-out-loud funny. The humor lies in Oliver's continued failures and Bernard's nearly unwitting successes and in the absurdity of the situations in which they find themselves. It reminded me a bit of Alexander McCall Smith's Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld series, as both feature protagonists who are arrogant and unaware of how asocial their behavior is. But unlike von Igelfeld, Oliver, at least in this outing, lacks any mitigating charms or fragility that would render him sympathetic. Bernard is of course the more likable character, and one hopes that he will return in subsequent installments of the series to serve as counterpoint to the buffoonish Oliver.