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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.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Pomerantz digs into notions of class and wealth in her debut, chronicling the upward strivings of a middle-class Jew as he loses himself in the strange world of the fabulously wealthy. Blessed with good looks and a bright mind, Robert Vishniak dreams of escaping his Philadelphia neighborhood. His first stop is Tufts, where, in 1965, he rooms with Sanford Trace, the rogue son of a wealthy family. Robert tags along with Trace and his buddies, who introduce him to Smith College girls, fancy clothes, and New York State's elegant Tuxedo Park. Family ties become strained as Robert is seduced by beauty and privilege, attends law school at NYU, and sinks into a cushy law firm job. Much of the narrative is structured around Robert's relationships with three women: Gwendolyn Smythe, a Brit with a terrible secret; his wife, Crea, the daughter of his law firm's founding partner; and Sally Johannson, a shoeshine girl from his old neighborhood. 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. (Aug.)