THE DOORMAN, by Chris Pavone
Chicky Diaz, the title character of Chris Pavone’s new novel, has worked at the Bohemia, one of the Upper West Side’s grandest apartment buildings, for nearly three decades. Along with fetching packages, hailing cabs and ignoring the often egregious behavior of the spoiled occupants, he serves as a buffer against the outside world. It’s his job to keep the chaos out.
But reality in all its unpleasantness has a way of penetrating even a faux-medieval castle surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with golden spikes, as the people in the building are about to find out. The action unfolds over a single tumultuous day that begins with an ominous intimation — someone might get killed before it’s over — and gathers force like an impending storm.
Pavone is the author of five previous books, literary thrillers characterized by elegant writing and intricate plotting. This is something bigger in tone and ambition. While a mystery hums beneath the narrative — who won’t make it out of the book alive? — “The Doorman” is better read as a state-of-the-city novel, a kaleidoscopic portrait of New York at a singularly strange moment.
As the day goes on, demonstrators protesting the latest killing of a Black man by a white cop are amassing reinforcements and heading to Billionaire’s Row on 57th Street, home to a cluster of obscenely tall buildings featuring grotesquely overpriced apartments. A counterprotest of white “law-and-order MAGA-capped dudes, the stand-your-grounders,” is also building steam, bolstered by more white men in fatigues and bulletproof vests riding around in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags.
Chicky’s immediate concern is what to do if the revolution (or the counter-revolution) comes to the Bohemia. But he has longer-term worries, including an unwitting beef with a thug named El Puño and crushing debt totaling $300,000, mostly from medical bills accrued during his beloved late wife’s battle with cancer. (This while working in a building where he once overheard someone bark into the phone: “It’s what … 80 million dollars? Ninety. Whatever. It’s nothing.”)
Even as he digs into Chicky’s life, Pavone gives equal time to a host of other memorable characters, all connected by a restless dissatisfaction that is magnified by the city itself. “The corrosive thing about New York is that there’s always someone with more — more money, more fame, more power, more respect,” he writes.
There’s Emily Longworth in apartment 11 C-D, for instance, caught in the maw of Pavone’s equal-opportunity satire — weaponized over-wokeness coming from the left and enraged proto-fascism coming from the right. On the one hand, she’s married to a loathsome man who has made billions selling a new kind of body armor to warlords and fundamentalists and who, when she mentions her volunteer work at a food pantry, snaps: “Nobody’s forcing you to spoon out slop to illegal immigrants.”
On the other, she has a daughter who wonders whether the family should “do a land acknowledgment” before dinner to recognize the territory “stolen from ingenious peoples … who were slaughtered in a holocaust” and who announces that her teacher — the one who wore a “Tax the Rich” T-shirt t,o Parents’ Day — “used to be mister but now they is mix.”
“Are you sure that’s the right, um … verb agreement?’” Emily asks.
Meanwhile, her father, a lifelong New York Democrat, “told a dirty joke at work, got called out by a young woman of color, canceled, bought out of his partnership, career over, and suddenly he was watching Fox News day and night.”
With its laser-sharp satire, its delicious set pieces in both rich and poor neighborhoods — a co-op board meeting, a Harlem food pantry and more — and its portrait of a restive city torn apart by inequality, resentment and excess, “The Doorman” naturally invites comparison to “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe’s lacerating dissection of New York in the 1980s.
(Let us adjust for inflation. Sherman McCoy, “Bonfire”’s master-of-the-universe main character, struggled to get by on his $1 million salary as a bond trader. One of Pavone’s characters has made more than $500 million selling his bubble-wrap company to a conglomerate.)
No one can beat the muscularity of Wolfe’s prose or the savagery of his satire. But Pavone’s humor is more humane, his sympathy for the characters’ struggles and contradictions more acute. With his eye for absurdity and ear for nuance, he seems as if he’s writing not from some elevated place high above the city, but from within it.
How, in a single book, can you characterize a place and a time this varied and this unwieldy? If “The Doorman” suffers from anything, it’s a surfeit of riches — details and digressions that can lead you away from the central story. But all of it accelerates into a tour de force ending (this is where it becomes a thriller) that rewards close attention. I had to read it twice to make sure I understood exactly who did what to whom.
I’m not sure where Pavone stands at this bewildering cultural moment — whether he has any answers, and not just questions. But maybe the last word should go to the Bohemia’s superintendent, Olek, a Ukrainian immigrant who has found the freedom to be a gay man in New York (though not at work, on account of his co-workers’ homophobic jokes).
“Americans were complacent, with their Miranda rights and public defenders, their supermarkets and free vaccinations, their Grindr, their Chelsea,” he thinks. “Everyday luxuries made it hard to anticipate worst-case scenarios. Americans thought the world was ending if their electricity went out and they couldn’t charge their phones to post on Instagram. They had no idea.”
THE DOORMAN | Chris Pavone | MCD x FSG | 388 pp. | $30
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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