The Doorman by Chris Pavone

The Doorman

By Chris Pavone

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

In the iconic movie about movies, “The Player,” screenwriters unroll imaginary banners over their heads to pitch studio executives’ dazzling mashups like “Ghost” meets “The Manchurian Candidate,” or “Out of Africa” meets “Pretty Woman.” Chris Pavone follows the formula in his excellent new novel, The Doorman. It is (sweeping hand gesture) “Bonfire of the Vanities” meets “Die Hard.”

The historic Bohemia Apartments on Park Avenue in New York City centers a bitingly modern tale. It’s a stratified anthill of class and wealth with a vile king and savvy, sympathetic queen, atop the pile. Our titular doorman and other building staff rarely circulate above ground level, but a drone can topple a mountain.

Well-placed flashbacks explain the complexity of the figure who greets the building’s wealthy occupants. For good reasons, he’s in a ton of debt, and for bad ones, he recently acquired a gun. There’s an art broker on the second floor who just received a heart wrenching medical prognosis and the power couple in the penthouse loathe each other but are trapped by an iron-clad prenup. Most pressing is the imminent violence which simmers on the other side of the borough. In a crisp opening, The Doorman introduces characters and keenly hints at bad elements seeping toward The Bohemia. Readers are reminded early that the rich may not be respected, but the power wielded by their money is hard to ignore.

Contemporary novelists obsess over if their books are Black enough, gay enough, or in so many ways, representative enough. Pavone walks a narrow path and constructs a cast that shines with authenticity while not feeling calculated. Minor characters are portrayed as convincingly as headliners, and every conceivable political and socioeconomic position is satirized with smart, realistic scenes. The precariousness of modern times is highlighted by a rotating narrative that offers all perspectives a voice. We are treated to absurdly fun examples of how an errant step, slight nudge, or wrong word, can crush the hyper-connected kingdoms of today.

The Doorman also especially adept at blending lower- and middle-class personalities into the orbit of the ultra-wealthy. A captain of the military industrial complex with nine figure wealth interacts with drivers and housekeepers as smoothly as a MOTU-philanthropist purchases paintings from a struggling art dealer. The novel strikes a conversational tone that balances vigorous dialogue. Acts of violence wait until the plot progresses and the story never abandons a sense of humor:

Olek is wearing nothing but jeans, holding a semiautomatic. Julian is wearing a tuxedo with that kid’s blood all across the white shirt, but his bow tie is still knotted. They are an unusual team.

The heart of this novel is in recognizing we are all flung together in an especially ridiculous time. Keeping that theme in sight, it is still able to land poignant moments:

Life can look like a series of foregone decisions, both the good and the bad, all the non-choices that create a predictable path, inescapable, inevitable, here is your home, your family, your friends, your job, here’s how you’ll grow old and here’s how you’ll die, each of us the hero of our own inconsequential little story, all of us eyewitnesses and unreliable narrators.

Rare is it that storytelling can underscore the ridiculousness of the modern political era without alienating sides of the spectrum. Whether wearing a big stupid MAGA hat or ridiculous social justice warrior badge, heroes and villains exist in the story for all. The Doorman encourages its audience to point at the screen of their news source of choice and snicker, while deceiving each side they should feel justified with their beliefs. It’s quite the trick.  

Pavone is known primarily for espionage thrillers. His previous book, Two Nights in Lisbon, was pedestrian and unextraordinary, so what an exciting surprise to discover he penned a mystery pulsing with realism and cultural understanding. The Doorman serves as a critical examination of greed, lust and crime, but also reminds us the value in continuing to sample work from writers we may not at first connect with.

The one significant flaw with The Doorman is apparent at first glance. How does a book distinct in so many ways have such an average title? It deserves better, so imagine “Succession” meets “Rambo.”

Ryan Davison, Ph.D. is a writer living in Lisbon.