The Doorman
By Chris Pavone ★★★★★★★½☆☆ 7.5/10 ""The corrosive thing about New York is that there's always someone with more- more money, more fame, more power, more respect. It's hard to ever feel as if you've truly made it, hard to stop..."
By Chris Pavone
★★★★★★★½☆☆ 7.5/10
386 pages
What’s it about?
Chicky Diaz works as a doorman on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a building called the Bohemia. The Bohemia is an iconic New York building that has always attracted the rich and famous. Chicky is struggling emotionally and financially after the death of his wife. But many others living in the Bohemia are struggling in their own ways as well.
What did it make me think about?
New York!
Should I read it?
One of my favorite reader friends gifted me this book last winter, when we were living in New York for a few months. We were fortunate enough to live in a building with a doorman and get a glimpse into the lives of many New Yorkers. And the doormen are the best! I did not get much reading done in New York, so this one has sat in a stack for a while. I was ready for a good suspense thriller, so this one finally made it out of the pile.
Chris Pavone captured a lot of New York in this book- and that was fun. But the story took a long time to set up, and the suspense only took hold for me in the last quarter of the book. Now, the last quarter was great, but it took too long to get there for my liking.
My only other issue with the book was that I felt like I was being lectured to a lot. "That's how Whit had gotten obscenely rich: by exploiting somebody else's invention, using connections from an expensive education financed by inherited wealth, to redirect taxpayer dollars from the working class into his own bank account. Whit had talked himself into being proud of this." Chris Pavone has a political point of view that he shares throughout this book. Even though I may agree with many of his points, I just wanted to be entertained while reading this book- to take a break from all the political divisiveness. For me, though, the sheer amount of political commentary was a negative.
I will go back and read his earlier book, "Two Nights in Lisbon" because I like his writing style. Maybe before he became a famous author, he did not feel the need to lecture...
A passage I marked
"The corrosive thing about New York is that there's always someone with more- more money, more fame, more power, more respect. It's hard to ever feel as if you've truly made it, hard to stop striving, hard to not show off."
