When he is offered a job as doorman, Ray is already well integrated into New York life and attached to it. His new employer is a woman residing at 10 Park Avenue, that Tower of Babel which was originally a grand hotel. Ray will end up spending fifty years of his life there, at the heart of a city whose streets he never tires of walking, observing things that happen nowhere else in the world and reflect a quite unique collective imagination.

Reminiscent of Singer, Henry Roth and Elia Kazan, this novel dances between characters and cityscapes while conveying a persistent sense of exile. It spans the New York of the 20th century, the prism through which Ray’s identity is refracted, and the first two decades of the 21st century, at the end of which he has become an old man. It is only then that he will decide to depart.