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"  In his first novel, Down the Shore ($27.95, Viking Adult), Stan Parish tells the story of two prep schoolers in need of a change of scenery: Tom, a townie, who gets busted for dealing drugs to his wealthier classmates; and Clare, a rich boarder, whose financier father is under investigation for insider trading. The pair attempt to reinvent themselves at St. Andrews, only to find a scene even more depraved than the one they left behind. We sat down with Parish, who is an editor at Bloomberg Pursuits, to discuss the dangerous glamour described in his book. Is it safe to assume that Down the Shore, which follows a character through the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and St. Andrews University in Scotland, is loosely autobiographical? No, actually. But it&amp;#039;s not a crazy thing to wonder; I did attend the schools you mention but my experiences were very different from the ones that Tom, the narrator, has in the Down the Shore. I was never arrested on drug charges in high school, for example. And I was actually a pretty decent student at St. Andrews, whereas Tom spends most of his time on the piss as they say in the UK. More importantly, Tom learns some hard lessons about breaking the rules and how we can be broken by them. I&amp;#039;m older than he is in the novel and I&amp;#039;m still not sure I&amp;#039;ve learned those things. And Tom is a better surfer than I am.  Was the novel shaped in any way by your experiences as a journalist?  When you spend a lot of time reworking other peoples writing, you learn what to look out for in your own work, whether it&amp;#039;s fictional or not. I would say that my work as a journalist shaped the novel in the literal sense: the structure of the book improved as I became a better editor. Also, there&amp;#039;s a scene in Part III that takes place at what&amp;#039;s called a driven shoot, which is like a skeet shoot but with with real birds instead of clays and a team of &amp;quot;beaters&amp;quot; whose job is to flush the specially bred &amp;quot;targets&amp;quot; from their feeding ground. I had no idea that driven shoots existed until I started writing travel stories for a certain luxury magazine formerly owned by American Express. So, there&amp;#039;s that. Among the characters in your book is a disgraced money manager. Apart from his age, what makes him different from the other characters? Michael Savage is learning a lot of the same lessons as the college-aged characters in the novel (not something you should be doing in your 50s): that there&amp;#039;s a real cost for misrepresenting yourself, that things catch up to you sooner or later, that the bill is in the mail. He&amp;#039;s an example of how a certain kind of success can be dangerously insulating. Tom looks up to this man in a perverse way, but at one point Michael essentially starts interviewing Tom, hoping, I think, that he can retrace his steps by examining the motivations of a younger man with similar aspirations. Which, of course, he can&amp;#039;t.  Do you think that young people of different means are subject to different rules?  I think that phenomenon has been pretty well documented. And I think there&amp;#039;s a growing awareness of how this insane double standard is hurting us as a society, particularly the way we jail segments of the population for petty drug offenses that many of us get away with every day. The nice thing about fiction is that you get to put your finger on the scale a little. No one in Down the Shore gets away with anything\u2014not completely, anyway. That&amp;#039;s certainly not true in life. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/reviews/a1815/stan-parish-down-the-shore/>