The Doorman: A Novel

Juan, a Cuban refugee working as a doorman at a Manhattan apartment building holds a bizarre court with the tenants' pets--an Egyptian dog, a rattlesnake, a bear, and others--who discuss their grievances and plan their liberation

Cuban novelist Arenas's ( Old Rosa ) exquisitely wrought surreal fantasy is a sardonic Swiftian parable on human cruelty and the impulse to flee from freedom. Juan, a Cuban refugee and overzealous doorman at a Manhattan luxury building, wants to help each tenant open the "door to true happiness." But the tenants resist enlightenment. Among them are an oddball pastor who touches or caresses everyone he meets; the inventor of the neon clothespin and the totally prosthetic body; a miserly retired actress who walks a stuffed dog every evening; two nearly identical gay lovers; and a suicidal woman whose fiance Juan pretends to be. All of the tenants have pets--dogs, cats, a rattlesnake, an orangutang, parrots, turtles, a trained bear, etc.--which mirror their personal foibles. As the animals warily befriend Juan and air their views on the dangerous human species, his conversations with the menagerie get him committed to a mental hospital. A fabulist of elegant invention, Arenas, who died last December, delivers a ferocious indictment of the human race.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An affecting parable of a modern knight-errant's search for the ``true door to happiness,'' and the first story by the late Cuban writer and exile Arenas (The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990, etc.) to be set in the US. Young Juan, a refugee from Cuba, is the doorman of a Manhattan apartment house--home to a disappointed and eclectic group of men and women, and to their even more unhappy pets. There are, among others: an aging leftist who keeps a polar bear to serve her (when she isn't in Cuba buying desperate young men with cheap trinkets); a suicidal young woman, beloved by Juan, whose pet is a rattlesnake; an impotent and aging lover-boy whose pet orangutan helps him out on dates; the nearly identical gay couple Oscar One and Two, with their terrified rabbit and fierce bulldog; the Supreme Pastor of the Church of Love through Constant Contact and his menagerie; and the millionaire family that owns the remarkable dog Cleopatra. As Juan opens the door for them and their pets, he always tries to please, hoping that they may know of the door he is looking for. His helpfulness is increasingly abused, and poor Juan despairs. But Cleopatra and the other animals have been watching him, and they appoint him their leader. Thought now to be mad, Juan is consigned to a psychiatric ward, but the animals rescue him and together set off across the country to California, where they find the doors to the lands and waters of their dreams. But Juan--the ``only hope'' and ``great weapon'' of outsiders and the persecuted--can find no door. The parallels to Arenas's own life are obvious, but this richly imagined story--often witty despite the tragic undertones- -transcends such limits as it celebrates the defender of ideals, Juan the doorman. A fine memorial. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A young refugee from Cuba who is the doorman for a New York City luxury apartment feels a calling to show everyone in his building a wider mystical door to true happiness. The residents of Juan's building are all laughable parodies: the Hispanic pastor who preaches salvation through physical brotherly love, the professor of political science who tries with her militant and hypnotic stare to reconvert Juan to the Marxism of his abandoned Cuba. Failing to interest them in his search for the true door, Juan is recruited by the various outlandish pets belonging to the residents in their own plan for liberation. The plural narrating voice debates aloud how to make this unusual story more believable, and although they consider assigning the job to Arenas, they discard the idea because they feel that the author's blatant homosexuality would cloud the objectivity of their message. This imaginative allegory of surreal humans and their surreal pets was written five years before the authors' death from AIDS in 1990.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.