Even though I enjoyed spending an insomniac night with Sharon Pomerantz's “Rich Boy” (Twelve) far more than could reasonably be expected — for once relishing the dead-of-night hours as a delightful period of uninterrupted engrossment instead of a long, irritated mental complaint about how much I’m going to hate the coming day — you won’t catch me calling it “fun to read,” no matter how sorry I was to put it aside.

“I sometimes feel that when people don’t know how to define a book, they say that it’s fun to read. But that makes it seem less serious,” said Pomerantz by phone from her home here in town, where she teaches English at the University of Michigan. “And what I wanted to do is write a serious novel that was fun to read because it moves, and it has tons of plot. I was kind of modeling it after mid-1850s writers like Anthony Trollope; many of them were very serious on the way they reflected on the times. ‘The Way We Live Now’ is my favorite. So I wanted something that was heavily plotted and fun to do.”

A choir of voices that stretches from O magazine to Slate.com has pronounced her quest for an enjoyably serious, big old drama a seriously enjoyable success. The titular rich boy is Robert Vishniak, a baby boomer born to working-class Jewish parents and raised in the Oxford Circle suburb of Philadelphia. He’s smart, good-looking and in possession of a formidable work ethic (the last largely thanks to a potent combination of encouragement and haranguing by his mother, Stacia), which he applies assiduously throughout his life to get what he wants. By the time he’s taking in 1980s Manhattan from the Upper West Side, he’s married a gorgeous woman with an egregious amount of money, come up for partnership at his exclusive law firm, had a dazzling daughter who’s captured his heart completely and spent uncountable weekends on the yachts and terraces of the fabulously privileged. In short, he’s Made It.

And the hundreds of pages it takes him to do it are a lot of fun. Far from being some overachieving drone whose tale of dedication leaves a trail of inadequacy in its wake, Robert weathers both his gifts and temptations with pretty much no more nor less grace than the next guy. Having a hormone-fueled discovery of the magic of the female form and desperate to gain access to it? Yeah, you might strike a deal you don’t really understand and perform some strange rituals to keep it afloat. Trying to get a college education in the late 1960s with a rich roommate who delights in sharing his endless supply of drugs? That’s a recipe for a bit of a speed habit. Your first true, searing romance ends in spectacular disaster? Gonna be a couple of years before you can even find your feet again, much less get back up on them. Working your way through a law degree from NYU in the broke 1970s? Probably means sharing rent with your drug-dealer brother and a lot of nights spent driving a cab. On the brink of a great marriage when your father-in-law, whose name is also at the top of your professional stationary, hands you an iron-clad prenup? You might find yourself torturing the definition of “dignity” until you find a version you think you can make apply to you.

And this is all in the first two-thirds of the story, before Robert’s success goes to his head and makes the muddle it often does of that sensitive organ.

Why did Pomerantz want to write about money? “Class is a big preoccupation of mine,” she explained. Her parents started out in a working class neighborhood surrounded by her entire family, the kind of place where she could pretty much knock on any door and sit down for dinner. But her mom dreamed of a nice house in the ’burbs, so they moved to “a broken down house on the edge” of Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line neighborhood. “It was a little like Ann Arbor is now,” she explained, “where you have to make an appointment to see anyone, and fit it in between horses and ballet and whatever, and the parents were doctors and lawyers and professionals. I had to learn a whole new set of behaviors; it was a whole different world.”

Her upwardly-mobile march continued at Smith College, where she “had friends who came to college with their own horses” and could fairly be described as the “upper upper” class. “And then I moved to Manhattan in the eighties and lived in the Upper West Side, where it looks like you’re making it but you’re living paycheck to paycheck.”

Despite her pedigreed resume and posh address, said Pomerantz, “really I felt like Robert, like I was living a double life. I was different with my family in their row houses; it was a different set of manners. And I’m not the only one — so many Americans leave the world they came from and go into something different. The American dream does exist; I’ve gotten to a much easier life than my parents. There aren’t so many of us as you’d think, statistically at least, but those of us that do, we leave something behind, and I wanted to write about that. And also because I noticed this thing where people, particularly from Oxford Circle but from other neighborhoods too, would make lots of money and become known, and then they would do something stupid and mess it up. I mean really stupid, like some kind of white collar crime (or weird, psychotic philanthropy). So I wondered, what is it with these people? They made all this money and they screw it up! So there really is this other side, this having to live with this other self, this other set of behavior.”

How closely did she align the story with her own biography? “It’s emotionally autobiographical, but in terms of the places it’s different,” she explained. “There are similarities, but in terms of the actual events, there’s almost no connection to my autobiography. Not only did I switch the gender, but Robert was born in 1947, older than me by 20 years. Part of that was I wanted to write about the seventies, and I didn’t want to do it from a child’s point of view. But also I really enjoy writing from the male point of view. I think men have an awful lot of freedom in the culture that women don’t have even now. I mean my God, that (Robert) was sent to New York City to drive a cab at 18 years old — my parents wouldn’t ever have done that! I still don’t see that many female cab drivers; it’s just too scary. The fact that he goes into any neighborhood he wants and doesn’t even think about it — as a woman, you don’t have that kind of physical freedom. And I was interested in writing about relationships from this kind of Casanova point of view. I mean, that’s not me. Men don’t fall at my feet.”

But good looks and charm are not, as Robert discovers, any immunization against heartbreak. Finding a question in the study guide on Pomerantz’ website that thrilled me with its wording, I couldn’t resist taking advantage of the opportunity to get the absolute right answer from the source (for once!): “Robert, Claudia and Tracey are all irrevocably affected by their first loves—so much so that they make endless mistakes that affect their lives for decades. What is Pomerantz suggesting about first love?” Well? “I do think it’s really powerful,” she answered. “There was a piece in the New York Times recently about a new study saying that although we have this idea that woman are the ones that go around damaged by relationships, actually, it’s men who get more damaged. Women cry and talk to their girlfriends and get it out, whereas men drink too much and beat people up. And I was like, 'well, yeah.' I was always encountering men who would say to me in their 30s, ‘Oh, this woman broke my heart when I was 18, and that’s why I’m not interested in relationships now,’ but I don’t know any women who say that. Even now in my 40s, I know women who have gone through terrible divorces with awful child custody battles and things, and they come out of it all right. They are devastated for a time, of course — but then they get a new haircut and move on.

“So I think first love for men is especially powerful, and I did want to write that; that was one of the major things that did motivate me. I knew from the beginning that I was gonna screw Robert up real badly,” she finished with a laugh. “It was gonna be really devastating.”

Maybe my favorite passage begins with Pomerantz writing of the Vishniaks, “They were a family built for the 1970s.” She goes on, “His parents and their siblings, alumni of the Great Depression, understood recession, unemployment and gas prices. They mostly held government jobs for low but secure salaries — drove public buses, delivered mail, read meters. Stacia, calling them into the dining room to eat, was, Robert noted, as close to cheerful as he’d ever seen her. She hadn’t voted for the bum either time, nor had anyone in her family. She didn’t own a car! Even her stove was electric! It was as if she’d always known.” It sounded pretty familiar, to tell you the truth. What would a family built for the 2010s look like?

“Oh…probably quite similar,” admitted Pomerantz. “There wasn’t a human being on Earth that hated Richard Nixon more than my dad. When I was young, I didn’t know that his name wasn’t Tricky Dicky, because that’s all I ever heard him called. The hatred that working class Jews felt for Richard Nixon was real, and honestly, being able to write that kind of hatred into a book during the Bush years was very cathartic. I couldn’t help but see a lot of parallels. ... And also the seventies were a hard time economically, and our economy was just falling apart as I was doing the main rewrites (of this book). I keep hearing about ‘the new frugality,’ but in my family it was the old frugality! Not my friends — my friends had swimming pools and two cars — but in my family, we had no car and we saved everything. Don’t you have that feeling that now it’s kind of chic to do that? I think the Vishniaks would be very much a family built for the 2010s.

“That is a really depressing thing to think about.”

Throughout the story, Stacia’s “make money make money make money” drumbeat propels Robert forward every time he stumbles or slows — and in a strange way, a similar sound could have kept Pomerantz from writing the book at all. “I’d been working in New York and had been freelancing for six or seven years, and it was just really hard to do that kind of work and write fiction,” said Pomerantz. “I would maybe write one short story a year, and then something would get published and I would get more interest, but I never had much to show (a publisher) because I had to make a living. My dad worked in a warehouse and my mom, who’s in her 70s, still works in a preschool. So there was never any question of asking anyone for money. The only way I could get the money to work on a book of this size was to get an MFA, and I must say I’m very grateful to the program at U-M. I was an older student, and I would say Nicholas Delbanco and Eileen Pollack really sold me on the program, and then I got to work with Peter Ho Davies. I didn’t much get to work with Charles Baxter, but I did ask him about getting the right point of view and he said, ‘Trial and error.’ No one ever took that advice more seriously — I think I tried every one there was! I just feel incredibly indebted to the university. They hired me as a lecturer, which meant I had to work and do it well, but I could get spring and summers off (to write). I made amazing friends here who have offered comments.

“I’m very glad that I got out of New York City, because I don’t think I ever could have written it there.”

Sharon Pomerantz will read from and talk about "Rich Boy" at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 14 at Nicola's Books.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer for AnnArbor.com.