Chris Pavone aimed high when he wrote The Doorman, a social satire with the engine of a thriller that examines the aftermath of the George Floyd movement on the diverse mix of humans who coexist uneasily in New York City. Whether or not Pavone intended it, the book can be seen as an update of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, from 1980s Wall Street to the age of Trumpism.
Befitting the 21st century, the central character is not a beleaguered Master of the Universe but a doorman named Chicky Diaz working at an exclusive Central Park West building called the Bohemia, a storied fortress not unlike the Dakota, the Beresford, or the San Remo.
Chicky is the Bohemia’s most popular doorman and a guy struggling with troubles he doesn’t deserve. No one in the building has the slightest idea what he’s going through, and even though the residents are mostly awful, he is unfailingly helpful and polite.
Chicky isn’t the only character who keeps his problems close. No one knows that Emily Longworth of 11C-D, the exquisite trophy wife of a reprehensible and fantastically wealthy businessman, can’t bear her husband, Whit, and spends clandestine afternoons trysting with a neighbor. Absolutely no one except his doctor knows that Julian Sonnenberg, a Bohemia resident and art dealer whose problems rival Chicky’s, is sitting on some dire medical news. And for a long time few knew the true nature of Whit Longworth’s body-armor business, though that’s about to change.
It is hard to believe that intelligent, kind, socially aware Emily would have married such a villain, but like some Gilded Age throwback, she was born and bred to marry into this system, and aside from working at a Harlem food pantry and dallying with her lover, she plays the role of the society wife at galas, on boards, and in the pages of Town & Country.
Like Wolfe, Pavone is an unsparing skewerer of all forms of hypocrisy, taking particularly gleeful aim at the hyper-progressive Upper West Side private-school scene. During dinner in the family’s gazillion-dollar apartment, Emily’s young daughter asks if they could do a land acknowledgment for the “ingenious peoples” whose nearby land was stolen from them. Emily knows her husband’s head would explode if this occurred, so she waves off her little S.J.W.
The book begins with news of the shooting of an unarmed Black man by a police officer, and we see the city gradually becoming a tinderbox. Proud Boy types and MAGA-hatted yahoos roam the streets spoiling for confrontation. On the eve of a demonstration, expensive buildings hire private security and gunfire occasionally breaks out.
Pavone’s characters go about their lives amid this simmering pot of racial tension, with frontline workers such as Gulf War vet Chicky facing the worst of it, spooked enough to tuck a gun into his waistband. It all climaxes in one chaotic night, masterfully orchestrated by Pavone. His wide canvas teems with characters from all levels of New York life, but much of what transpires that evening is focused on the glittery 1-percenters at an art gala. Revelations about Whit’s business have made him a target of protesters, as well as of others with a different agenda, and this event is where things start to implode for the Longworths.
Unlike Bonfire of the Vanities, which used crime as a sensational sideshow, The Doorman employs the elements of a thriller to bring the story home to a messy, tour de force conclusion. Pavone makes lots of subtle observations along the way, but this one sums it up in black and white: “Nothing stokes hatred so much as being hated. This is true for fans of sports teams, it’s true for sectarian conflicts. It’s true for racism, it’s true for warring nations. It’s true for one person at a time, hating one other person.”
There’s plenty of hate to go around in BritBox’s I, Jack Wright, which takes the cliché of a will that’s been mysteriously changed and uses the fallout to reveal a fractured family’s secrets and lies. It’s a tad shameless in its manipulations and soapy plot twists, but also a lot of fun, thanks to the crisp directing of Tom Vaughn and a well-cast group of actors who elevate the material.
Thrice-married patriarch Jack Wright (Trevor Eve), whose fortune is built on the manufacture of bricks, has only one brief scene before he’s found dead of a gunshot to the chest at his country estate, presumably a suicide. When colleagues and family learn at the reading of the will that a new set of inexplicable bequests has replaced his old will, the gathering erupts in anger and confusion. Old rivalries are revived and old wounds are opened, leading those who were slighted to contest the validity of Wright’s changes. Adding to the general sense of distress and suspicion is D.C.I. Hector Morgan’s (Harry Lloyd, who is Charles Dickens’s great-great-great-grandson!) determination that Wright was murdered.
The series is framed by present-day interviews with some of the characters, presumably for a documentary. We know their current circumstances from the start, but the question of how they’ve ended up there fuels the mystery.
If you have no tolerance for the machinations and foolishness of a group of people motivated mainly—though not entirely—by greed, this may not be the show for you. But there’s a sly hint of a wink, of not taking itself too seriously, that makes I, Jack Wright highly watchable.
Major credit for toeing this line goes to the whole cast, but especially striking are Nikki-Amuka Bird as Jack’s fierce and elegant third wife, Lloyd as the unflappably cool detective, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis as the wily granddaughter, and John Simm (Grace) as the self-pitying, screwup son with unrealized rock ’n’ roll dreams. Fans of Simm’s Roy Grace series will find him transformed here, from a soulful police detective to I, Jack Wright’s most punchable character. And that is first-class acting.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
