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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.
"More a soap opera than an excavation of the spiritual malaise of the wealthy, the novel will satisfy those looking for an easy-reading saga with an intriguing, complicated hero at its center." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Pomerantz's sweeping tale captures the intimate truths and hypocrisies of class, identity, and one man's quintessential American experience." - Booklist
"Sure to be found in many beach bags this summer, this novel will appeal to fans of family sagas and coming-of-age stories." - Library Journal
"A pleasant if insubstantial rags-to-yuppiedom saga." - Kirkus
This information about Rich Boy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sharon Pomerantz is a graduate of the University of Michigan's M.F.A. program. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The Missouri Review and Ploughshares. Her story "Ghost Knife" was included in The Best American Short Stories 2003, and "Shoes" was nationally broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts. She currently teaches writing at the University of Michigan. This is her first novel.
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