This Doorman Doesn't Hold Doors

Reinaldo Arenas' book, The Doorman, bears some resemblance to the popular Ray Bradbury work The Martian Chronicles. Both satirize contemporary life by mixing symbols of daily existence with elements of the fantastic. In Bradbury's book, however, these various aspects were perfectly mixed and balanced. The author wove his tale using both these elements as his thread. Arenas is not nearly so skilled a craftsman.

The novel centers on Juan, an immigrant from Cuba, who wanders in and out of various jobs in the United States until he ends up in New York as a doorman in a fancy building on the Upper East Side. Throughout the novel, we meet the eccentrictenants of the building, from a man whose apartment is filled with candy to an oral surgeon who replaces teeth with artificial and permanent white smiles. Juan's goal is to reveal to these people the figurative "door" through which they may walk to find truth and spiritual contentment.

It is an interesting premise, but one which Arenas handles clumsily. It seems as if he had an idea, linked that idea with a series of images, strung the chapters together, and called it a book. Unfortunately, there is that much lack of subtlety here. First, Juan's desire to reveal this spiritual door is hardly believable--Arenas rarely mentions it except as a device to justify Juan's spending time in the tenants' apartments. It is tacked on and never explored except in a throwaway chapter which concludes the novel. This is the chief example of Arenas's grand ambition to pack his brief work with as many profound themes as possible, while forgetting the craft involved in writing a piece of fiction.

However, there are extremely inventive sections in the book, such as the description of one tena it whose fantastic beliefs lead him to bind his pets a pairs. But even these sections come off dry and forced, as if the author thinks of them as mere examples of his main theme. And once he is finished with these images, he scarcely ever returns to to them, as if he writes from a checklist, crossing off the images as he completes each chapter.

These strung-together images go nowhere, leaving us totally unprepared for the concluding section of the novel in which Juan becomes insane and leads a revolution of the tenants' pets. Like the images, the conclusion is another object added to Arenas' string, so that by the end of the novel it is as if we hold in our hands not a cohesive story, but a stack of pages held together only by a bead of glue.

The one good thing about this kind of writing is that it creates in the reader that empty feeling which, apparently, many immigrants to the United States feel. No matter how much we like to think of the American existence as an embrace of all types of people, many of those who come here feel isolated, empty, and unsatisfied.

Juan's experience in the United States (apparently Arenas had similar feelings upon escaping his native Cuba on the Mariel boat lift in 1980) has given him nothing to which his soul can cling. Everything is on the surface and artificial, it's all candy and fake, pearly-white smiles. This kind of empty sensation is similar to the feeling sparked effectively in the reader by Arenas' sparse, transitionless writing.

"In one corner was a birdcage where two small doves tied to each other by their wings fluttered about. Inside a huge bottle swarmed some flies, apparently coupled by a remarkable glue. There were cockroaches and mice, all tied in pairs."