John Ralston Saul is about as well-travelled as an author can be. For much of his adult life, the 65-year-old essayist, public intellectual, and novelist has been globetrotting in various guises, from writer to the spousal consort of former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson to his current gig as president of PEN International. Saul’s cosmopolitan CV enriches and enlivens virtually every page of his 14th book, which is billed as a novel but reads more like a thinly veiled memoir structured as a series of linked, anecdotal short stories.

Saul is as coy about the autobiographical aspect of the stories as his narrator is in dispensing clues to his own background. (The book is bisected by a chapter-long, largely unnecessary intercession in which the narrator muses on his role as an authorial instrument.) Anonymous but for the nickname “Ding, Dong,” Saul’s narrator is a foreign correspondent with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of friends and acquaintances – almost all of the patrician, monied sort – who require his attentive company as much as he seems to crave their generous hospitality.

Whether focusing on a boorish Texas oilman who contracts out the murder of his mistress or a scheming French woman who inherits an American tire company, there is something unmistakably old-fashioned about the way these tales are told, even down to the little twist near the end, reminiscent of Maupassant or O. Henry, that has long since become outmoded. The conversational, insinuating, gossipy tone makes you feel as if you are sitting next to Saul’s narrator at one of the high-toned dinner parties that crowd his social calendar.

As a fiction writer, Saul does not always succeed here. The story of a secretly gay American investor, while intriguing, is marred by a crucial lapse in logic. Then, finally, there is the question of how it all holds together as a novel. The answer is not well, despite ample amusement along the way.