The Doorman’s Repose

Book Details
The Doorman’s Repose
Chris Raschka, The New York Review, hb. 978 1 8478 0186 9, 2008, £12.99, 188pp.
Fiction, 11+ years
These are inventive, gentle and wryly humorous stories which embody a democratic ideal that embraces eccentricity, and which values kindness, friendship and human understanding. They depict New York as a diverse community of, among others, lovers of baseball and flowers, psychologists, jazz musicians and boxers, even if the last three are mice.
For Raschka’s interest is not in just the human residents. As well as the building’s rodent community, he introduces us to Otis the match-making elevator; and to the history of a music room, which in the division of a floor into smaller apartments is lost and miserable for decades, only to be reconnected with light and life.
The stories are accompanied by the author’s illustrations, characterisations which themselves seem to gesture towards the style of the middle twentieth century. I love these stories. I don’t find them to be particularly written for, or to be enjoyed by, only children, although the main linking character is Theo, a ‘middle schooler’ and the stories frequently honour the lives of the older residents through the respect and friendship of the youngest.
Review by Clive Barnes