A man named Anthony grew up in Palm Beach in the mid-1900s, where his parents owned a hotel that had a star-studded guest roster. He was never much for helping out with the business, and he went away to college in Miami, where he was equally as unmotivated to do his schoolwork. He only stayed because of the attention he received from women, who fawned over his knowledge of different celebrities who had stayed at his parents’ hotel. Eventually he fell in love and married a girl named Melanie and together they moved into a room in his parents’ hotel, where they both helped manage the business. They went to Paris for a brief honeymoon, but their cluelessness damaged Anthony’s inflated ego and he wrote the trip off as a failure. When they got back, he’d often go out for drinks in other hotels to feel important, which is how he began an affair with a young girl named Debbie. One day, Melanie finds him out and is furious, immediately vowing to leave despite Anthony’s attempts to woo her back with gifts and apologies. After she leaves him, with hefty alimony payments included, the only thing that comforts him is playing his clarinet. He begins a string of affairs with married women and almost burns down the hotel with a lit cigarette. His parents insist that his behavior change and he goes to stay with one of his older sisters, but he gets the idea to instead skim money from the hotel ledgers and return to Paris.  After his dirty work is done and he arrives in Paris, Anthony meets a beautiful woman named Liliane, who he immediately takes to. The two hang out and fool around for a while, he buys her nice things, and she convinces him to sell his plane ticket. He falls into a pattern of drinking heavily. One morning, he wakes up and sees that his suitcase of money is completely empty, and Liliane is nowhere to be found. Furious, he tries to contact her, but there is no response and his tenure at the hotel is almost up. He plays his clarinet and drinks heavily to drown his problems, but the staff kicks him out so he goes to play on the street. There, he finds that people will toss him money, so he begins playing in train stations and subways even as he becomes homeless. To keep himself warm, he drinks to excess. Eventually he collects enough to rent a room in a cheap hotel, where he continues this cycle of drinking and playing until his mother connects him with her ex-husband who lives in Paris.  Anthony goes to dinner with his mother’s ex Norman and his wife Josette, but he passes out drunk towards the end. The next day he returns on Christmas with his clarinet and plays for their guests. Josette invites him to her Hindu meditation class, where he makes a nuisance of himself while drunk, and another American invites him to an AA meeting. He laughs off the offer and steals money from the Hindu offering on his way out, much to Josette’s dismay. The guilt eats at him, and the next day when he sees Liliane in the subway while he’s playing, he finally decides to go to the AA meeting and get sober. He stays in Paris for a while after until he falls in love with a girl named J.J. and goes back to New York with her. There, he gets a job managing a jazz club, relapses, and she leaves him. After that, he goes through a slew of jobs until he finally ends up managing a halfway house for men leaving prison. When his parents die, he wastes his share of inheritance on a failed foundation while his sisters buy themselves cars and hotel additions. The sisters think of him as a financial idiot, but later on they are part of hundreds of people who fall victim to a Ponzi scheme and realize they are fools as well.