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Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Racial tensions flare around swanky Manhattan apartment
Welcome to The Doorman, potentially the hottest summer read of 2025. This novel has everything covered — love, money, politics, intrigue, sex and murder. If you're reading it at the beach and need some shade, its wide 400-page paperback format will also cover your face. But you won't be dozing in the company of this hyper-intelligent thriller. Chris Pavone is the bestselling American author of Two Nights in Lisbon and The Expats, as well as winner of both Edgar and Anthony Awards. This latest book is sweepingly reminiscent of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, (1987) and of the recent television success of The White Lotus, though The Doorman lives and breathes in one city only: today's New York. Pavone grew up in Brooklyn and writes with personal authority about urban life. The story begins with Chicky Diaz, the most loved and trusted guardian of the legendary Dakota-like Bohemia Apartments in the polished, glossy neighbourhood around Central Park West and Fifth Avenue. Chicky's uniform is immaculate and his manner is gracious. He's had the job for 28 years. As the reader meets him, he's busy thinking about all the great places there are to kill someone in this city. What follows is an insider's tour of the Bohemia's million-dollar-and-up apartments (no triflers, please) and their occupants, and a closeup of the gritty realities tucked safely away from public view. This is a familiar literary device, but these privileged personalities, their struggles and the irreconcilable tensions they carry distinguish and define the contemporary quality of life (or lack of it) in the world's allegedly greatest city right now. Pavone gives us the casually villainous Whit Longworth (in the penthouse), who has capitalized on inherited wealth in ways you don't want to know. Neither does his lovely wife Emily, who can't bring herself to divorce that wealth in favour of the integrity she once cherished. Julian Sonnenberg (2A) is trying to hang on to some kind of ethical life in his art business, but he's running desperately from middle age, feeling less visible and relevant every passing day. It seems the only spontaneous, joyful creature in the millionaires' retreat is Julian's aging dog, Gillie. Bohemia's tenants/owners are all white, and the place is smoothly administered by a totally non-white staff. So when white police kill another Black man on the nearby streets, the stage is set for a demonstration, a counter-demonstration and the threat of violence unimaginable to the normally insulated Bohemians. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The Doorman explores several themes, which surprisingly include the relationship between rich women and food. (Have you tried the cardboard diet?) There's also the lasting stain of racism, expressed now in normalized inequities. While the residents of the Bohemia enjoy $700 sneakers and desserts featuring gold leaf, people like Chicky accumulate hundreds of thousands in debt trying to provide health and education for their families. Chicky handles all the aggravations the ludicrously wealthy can't be bothered with, at the same time living himself on the edge of eviction from his modest home, with no respite in sight other than the hope of a second job. Living with this cancerous imbalance is widely accepted as business as usual, but Pavone's book suggests it's 'a level of shamelessness that's close to clinical insanity.' He does so in achingly beautiful, precise and perceptive language which will both disturb and comfort many readers, especially those new to his work. Lesley Hughes is a Winnipeg writer.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Murder, Lust and Obscene Wealth in a City on Edge
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.'
