We chat with author Chris Pavone about The Doorman, which is a pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder.
Hi, Chris! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I was born and raised in New York City, and except for college and a brief sojourn as an expat in Luxembourg, I’ve only ever lived here. And I’ve only ever worked in book publishing—for the first half of my career as an editor, then as a novelist, and I’ve now published six thrillers. I’ve been married for a quarter-century, and I’m the parent of college-student twins and the best dog ever in the history of dogs.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’ve loved stories as long as I can remember, and somehow in college I decided that I wanted to be a writer, though in all honesty I don’t remember why, or what I thought that meant. How do young people decide what to do with their lives? It’s alchemy. But I didn’t want to put all my eggs into this one flimsy and unreliable basket, so instead I got into publishing. If the writing never worked out, I reasoned, I could have a rewarding career as an editor, which seemed preferable to the other tenuous paths to becoming a novelist. And I loved it. Book publishing is populated by my favorite types of people, who are motivated by my favorite types of reasons, and pretty far down on that list is money. No one gets into publishing to get rich.
I eventually tired of the publishing business for the normal reason that people get tired of careers: I found myself wading through the swamp of middle-management. So I quit office life, spent some time ghost-writing, book-doctoring. Then my wife got a job in Luxembourg, we moved abroad, and I started writing The Expats when I was 41 years old. It was a New York Times bestseller, won a couple of awards, and was translated into two dozen languages.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Kid Who Batted 1.000, a baseball novel for kids.
- The one that made you want to become an author: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and in particular the five-word chapter from the point of view of Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.”
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, because everyone keeps comparing my new novel to it.
Your latest novel, The Doorman, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Race, class, money, sex, murder.
What can readers expect?
Race, class, money, and sex combust into murder. It’s pretty clear from the opening sentence that someone is going to die. The reader’s journey is to discover who, and when, and how, and perhaps most interestingly, why.
Where did the inspiration for The Doorman come from?
A half-decade ago we moved into a famous New York apartment house, and I became friends with an incredible doorman. This novel isn’t based on either the real building or the real doorman, but it was inspired by both.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Is it unbecoming to say all of it? I love the little moments of New Yorkiness on the subway, at school drop-off, in a restaurant. I love the set pieces—the racism-tinged coop board meeting, the performative-progressive gala, the sexy onset of the extramarital affair. I love the minor characters, from the building’s prison-tatted Ukrainian super and the Black Liberation Theology porter to the cameo characters Skye Walker and the academese-spewing educator called QR Code, and I love even the villains—the profiteer-billionaire douchebag, the private-militia lunatic. I love the little boy who weighs his poop, I love the little girl who wants a land acknowledgment for the ingenious Lenape, I love the old spaniel. But most of all I love the three main characters, I love their struggles, their solutions, I love the momentous decisions they make at the fateful fatal end of this story.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
I’m normally a very deliberate, very anticipatory writer: I figure out what I want to do before I do it. But I started writing this book during covid, when I was working badly for a variety of reasons that are obvious now but I didn’t see then. I didn’t do enough planning, so I didn’t know where the book was aiming, so I foundered for nearly a year, stumbling into dead ends, exploring unproductive plot lines, writing superfluous scenes. Eventually I admitted to myself that I needed to go back to the beginning, figure it all out—create an outline, justify every scene, every character. I threw away a tremendous amount of material, rethought and reorganized and rewrote everything else. It was frustrating, and took a lot of time, and it looked like a very bad process. But then again this is the best book I’ve ever written, and that messy process was what got me here, so who knows? Maybe it was exactly the right way to go about it.
What’s next for you?
Beyond The Doorman, the main thing I’m doing is trying to turn one of my previous novels into a feature film, which has been tremendous fun.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
Two memoirs, both for very personal reasons: When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter, whose old apartment I now live in; and I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally, whose first book project was The Balthazar Cookbook, which I acquired, edited, and published two decades ago. Those guys both represent a very specific vision of downtown New York from my downtown youth, that cookbook is still one of my all-time favorite projects, I still eat in Keith’s restaurants, and I now keep my books on Graydon’s built-in bookshelves.
