The Doorman

I want to begin this book report by apologizing to all my friends whose calls I ignored last weekend.

Sorry, but I was preoccupied. Racing through the last 70 or so riveting pages of The Doorman, Chris Pavone's latest novel.

I couldn't put it down. And I didn't want to be interupted. So I let all calls go to voice mail.

Oh, how to describe the thrills of reading this book?

It's like a sociological deep dive into the hearts and minds of New Yorkers in age of Trump, with a ton of mystery on the side.

And then in those last aforementioned 70 or so pages, the book turns into a thriller and it's one helluva ride.

I don't want to give anything away. So I'll just say--think of it as The Bonfires of the Vanities meets Gone Girl. And let it go at that...

Bonfires is Tom Wolfe's masterpiece--a satirical take down of New York City in the 1980s, written with a contemptuous attitude toward just about everyone in NYC back then. Including rich and poor, Black and white, Liberal and conservatives. Well, especially liberals. Not so much conservatives. 

Wolfe hated liberals way more than he hated conservatives. Actually, he didn't really hate conservatives at all. As he was one.

And for that matter I'm not sure he hated liberals so much as had utter contempt for them. A subtle difference.

Conservative America's favorite writer...

Wolfe thought liberals were phonies. He enjoyed mocking them. He mocked them in his fiction and his non-fiction. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Makers--his non-fiction take down of Leonard and Felician Bernstein throwing a fundraiser for the Black Panthers in their opulent Park Avenue duplex is still tough to take.

At least for me. Who had much sympathy for liberals like the Bernsteins. Hey, at least they were trying.

And for one former minister of the Black Panthers, who referred to Wolfe and his book as "that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing..."

Conservative readers, on the other hand, can't get enough of it. Trump calls it his favorite book. Though it's obvious from the way he referred to it that he'd never read it. Couldn't even remember the name. He just knew what he knew about the book from reading the New York Post. Which is...

This is the book that makes the people he hates look bad. 

In retrospect, pretending he read a book he never actually read is the least of Trump's many lies.

Now back to The Doorman...

Like Wolfe, Pavone goes hard at the current set of Manhattan limousine liberals, who are incessantly virtue signaling even as they send their children to the most expensive and exclusive of private schools.

Unlike Wolfe, he also goes after Manhattan conservatives, who are just as phony in their own way. And he has several fabulous take downs of Trump.

The book is filled with spot-on observations about the savage inequities and painful realities that many people must face as they get older and more vulnerable and more realistic about the mistakes they've made in life.

I suspect it will be made into a TV series or a movie. 

So read it now, if only to say you knew about The Doorman long before it was fashionable.