When I watched Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street two years ago, I was most struck by the filmmakers’ ability to elicit my sympathy for a character who, on the surface of things, is completely despicable --- addicted to money, abusing drugs, being cruel to women, all fueled by the insatiable greed of Wall Street. Now Robert Goolrick has managed to do much the same thing in a literary vein, in his latest novel, THE FALL OF PRINCES, set amid the riotous ambiance of excess that was New York’s financial sector in the 1980s.

The book’s central character in THE FALL OF PRINCES is Rooney, who is called by name only a couple of times here --- otherwise, he is nameless and might as well be anonymous, a stand-in for perhaps hundreds of others whose stories mirror his own. In different chapters, we see very different Rooneys. On one hand, we see a young man in love with himself and with money, freshly minted from business school, ready to conquer the investment bank known only as “The Firm.” In other chapters, we see a significantly older but far wiser Rooney, one who is steeped in regret, having lost everything in a series of spectacularly bad decisions, working as a bookseller, of all things.

"What’s remarkable about Goolrick’s beautifully written novel is that even as he’s showing these young men to be simultaneously crafty, cruel and phenomenally successful at what they do, he also makes them appear innocent, somehow, the products of a simpler time."

Over the course of numerous vignettes, we come to learn and understand how one Rooney became the other, how a life characterized by million-dollar bonuses, thousand-dollar prostitutes, unlimited lines of cocaine, and a fanatical obsession to one’s body and wardrobe could evaporate so suddenly.

Rooney depicts himself as just one of many Masters of the Universe, nearly all of whom eventually suffered similar, if not worse, fates --- succumbing to the predictability of suburbia, leaving The Firm in disgrace, or taking an even more tragic route to the bottom. What’s remarkable about Goolrick’s beautifully written novel is that even as he’s showing these young men to be simultaneously crafty, cruel and phenomenally successful at what they do, he also makes them appear innocent, somehow, the products of a simpler time. Part of this is tied up in the AIDS crisis, of course, which makes Rooney begin to come to terms with his own sexuality. But part of it is just the reader’s accumulated knowledge of everything that came after Rooney’s heyday, from Black Monday to 9/11.

In an author’s note, Goolrick characterizes THE FALL OF PRINCES as a “scrapbook of our youth.” It does read like a scrapbook in many ways, with individual chapters that are as well crafted as short stories, but with some details that are repeated again and again (such as Rooney’s penchant for thousand-thread-count sheets, even when every other trapping of his formerly luxurious life is long gone). Goolrick, who worked as a New York ad executive in the 1980s and suffered his own fall from grace, also writes about all these things both knowingly and convincingly, eliciting readers’ sympathies, perhaps even in spite of themselves.