Peter Wheelwright's Reviews > The Door-Man

I think these suggest 5 stars, you tell me.
Early Praise for The Door-Man:

The Door-Man is a big, deep, beautiful book that ponders the mysteries of identity and existence--where we're from and what we are, and the hidden forces that bind people together and drive them apart. Peter Wheelwright has written a riveting multigenerational saga that is also a meditation on time itself--what it gives and what it takes, and ultimately, what endures.
–Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country and The Tenth Muse

“Like Richard Powers and Barbara Kingsolver, Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright renders the inextricable connection between natural history and human history in this beautifully layered and richly imagined novel. Wheelwright’s perceptive and observant door-man, Kinsolver, is a wonderful repository of comings and goings, past and present. As much philosopher and identity sleuth as valet, he excavates the stories of three generations from their entanglement with the geologic history of upstate New York, thereby offering escape from repetition of an aberrant past. One gets the feeling that Wheelwright knows this territory in his bones!"
—Paula Closson Buck, Author of Summer on the Cold War Planet

“Wheelwright conjures another time and world, a once-here historical intrigue as poignant as memory. Filled with insight, deft detail and wry wit, The Door Man is exactly the novelistic embrace we need in our agitated bewilderment.”
—John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance

"A suspenseful reflection on identity and memory, with their unsparing strangeness and dreamlike fragility, The Door-Man intimates that while time does not heal all, it does elicit forgiveness. Wheelwright reminds us that, like memory itself, life does not progress steadily without opposition, but occurs in unexpected leaps and bounds, seemingly random and always incomplete. A complex and thoughtful book."
—Susanna Moore, Author of In the Cut and Miss Aluminum-A Memoir

“Starting from the political intrigue, science, and mechanics of a massive public works project—the creation of a reservoir for New York City by flooding communities in the Catskills—The Door-Man is, at one level, a historical fiction, vibrant with the colors and controversies of the region from the early 20th century, and on this strength alone, it would hold us. But Wheelwright’s writing, so rich with detail, winds across generations and brings to life a vast array of characters—from muleskinners and paleontologists to murderers and a door man. We are swept into a swirling plot that is at once suspense story, speculative fiction, romance, and comedy. And it is more than these. Just as blasting the earth in a tiny upstate town reveals a history before history, setting in motion the quest to revive a primeval forest, Wheelwright’s novel takes us deep into human motivation and beyond it, to a concept of time that dwarfs us. Like his own award-winning As It Is On Earth, The Door-Man asks each of us to reflect on our place on these American lands and among the people we’ve variously misunderstood, loved, displaced, or forgotten.”
—Derek Furr, author of Semitones and Suite for Three Voices