The Doorman
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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
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Mr. Pavone has written an outstanding book full of sociological detail and pulsing with the passions and prejudices of the times in which we live.
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Chris Pavone proves himself a master of deception ...
While formulaic 'MAGA vs. woke' tropes scattered throughout tend to flatten his characters’ three-dimensionality, Pavone proves to be a master of deception, keeping the reader guessing the direction from which violence may come. When it inevitably does, it arrives as Hemingway’s famously described bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises: 'Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.' Breathtakingly, in fact.
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