For this Philly guy, money is everything

Robert Vishniak, the Philadelphia-born hero of Sharon Pomerantz's novel

Rich Boy

, has a transformative revelation early in life:

"Get out of here, save yourself, make money, make money, make money."

Robert's isn't a glorious, Joycean epiphany about the life of the artist, or a Sartrean vision of the meaninglessness of existence.

It's about money.

Due Aug. 2 from Twelve publishers, Rich Boy is a quintessentially American story, an epic 517-page deconstruction of class, wealth, and ambition that suggests that at least since the '80s, the American Dream has become synonymous with avarice.

Pomerantz's impressive debut, which is being compared to The Great Gatsby and Bonfire of the Vanities, is also an enjoyable, accessible read.

"I love those big, multilayered Victorian novels," says the Philly-born author, citing the prolific English stylist Anthony Trollope.

"I love that Trollope can deal seriously with class and politics in page-turners everyone can enjoy."

Pomerantz develops her sweeping themes through a closely observed study of Robert, a devastatingly handsome if not-so-nice working-class Jewish boy from Northeast Philly who grows up to join Manhattan's power elite as a real estate lawyer.

The story opens in 1953, when 5-year-old Robert and his younger brother Barry conspire to lift a wallet from one of their rich relatives. It ends in the aftermath of Black Monday, the crippling stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987.

The novel is structured around Robert's relationships with the most powerful women in his life: his overbearing, controlling mother, Stacia; his college girlfriend, an enigmatic, upper-class Englishwoman named Gwendolyn; his wife, Crea, whom he marries for money; and Sally, a working-class girl from Philly who tempts him away from Crea.

Pomerantz, 45, who was born into a blue-collar Jewish family in East Mount Airy, drew from her childhood experiences to fashion Robert. But unlike Pomerantz, Robert spends most of his life trying to erase, cover up, and bury his blue-collar past.

"I grew up in rowhouses surrounded by aunts and uncles [four on her father's side, six on her mother's] who lived in rowhouses in the same neighborhood," Pomerantz says from her home in Ann Arbor, Mich., where she teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

By the time she was 7, most of Pomerantz's extended family had moved to the Northeast. Her parents had other plans and opted to live in Wynnewood.

"My mom wanted us to get into a good school district," says Pomerantz, a Lower Merion High School alumna who attended Smith College.

"I went from rowhouses . . . where kids just played on the street to the suburbs where everyone was more formal and . . . had piano lessons and ballet classes."

Like Robert, whose smarts win him a place at Central High and, later, a degree from Tufts University in Boston, Pomerantz was the first in her family to go to college. She says life in the suburbs, which exposed her to families from the upper classes, gave her a new perspective.

"It made me look at class from a very young age," she says. "I had this bifurcated life where during the week I adjusted to a new way of being. . . . Over the weekends we would visit family in the Northeast, where there was a different way of socializing, of talking, eating."

She says Robert's seemingly insatiable thirst for wealth, status, and social acceptance touches on an issue Americans are loath to discuss.

"More than anything, [Rich Boy] is about class. Class in the United States in general, class in Philly in particular and in the Jewish community," she says. "Class is the elephant in the room, the dirty secret no one talks about."

Rich Boy gives the lie to the idea that hard work and ambition are all that separate us from becoming rich. Or that success is synonymous with wealth.

"Statistically, a very small number of people move beyond their class," Pomerantz says. "There aren't that many Oprahs, but it can happen, and because of that we still strive for it."

Rich Boy also provides a view of the '60s that departs significantly from the standard story told by many baby boomers.

Robert, who comes of age in the late '60s, scoffs at campus liberals, and his views about the Vietnam War are colored entirely by his fear of being drafted.

"I think so many of these hippies weren't really political, but were self-interested guys who wanted to have a good time," Pomerantz says.

Robert isn't the only character in Rich Boy to reflect Pomerantz's life. She says she had a great time with Sally, an aspiring actor who shines shoes for money.

"For almost two years after college, I was a shoeshine girl in Boston," Pomerantz says. "I went into a lot of those places, Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers. . . . I was on the trading floor when the crash happened in '87."

Sally is one of the few truly likable characters in Rich Boy. As interesting, complex, even sympathetic as he is, Robert is a calculating, manipulative, scheming opportunist. He's hardly a great American hero. Pomerantz says some readers have told her that they hate the guy.

Does she?

"I've lived with Robert for nine years. I love him," she says. "It's like asking a mother if she loves her children. Even if one of them is a sociopath, she'll say, 'Of course I do.' "