5 days 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.
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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.
