Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learned about women, through seduction and heartbreak, pays off. For a brief moment, he has it all-but the world in which he finds himself is not the world from which he comes, and a chance encounter with a beautiful girl from the old neighborhood-and the forgotten life she reawakens-threatens to unravel his carefully constructed new identity.
Ten years in the making, Sharon Pomerantz’s Rich Boy is a sweeping novel of class, sexual rebellion, money and love. A tapestry that interweaves the lives of poor and middle class, middle class and supremely wealthy, Rich Boy shows us four decades in an American century through the eyes of one ceaseless dreamer. It’s a book that looks fearlessly at both our desire to remake ourselves, and the price we pay for the privilege.
Rich Boy is Pomerantz' first novel. She's a short story writer too.
