One of Rinaldi's accomplishments is depicting an assortment of characters of very different backgrounds with equal depth and clarity. Even those who get only scant attention are drawn sharply with a few strokes, as with the banker who helps govern the building: "the large nose, the broad, beefy face, the washed-out eyes pale as dishwater, and mostly the hands, pudgy, with short stubby fingers... Thick they may be, but they are clever hands, nimble hands, sleight-of-hand hands that are making money hand over fist."

That observation is made by the concierge, Farro Fescu, who, in the role of Stage Manager / Mary Sue observes all comings and goings, keeping detailed files of his charges' needs and habits. His brief chapters frame the main characters' longer tales, and, considering the entropy that comes to threaten the building's society-in-miniature, it's only fitting that Fescu, its human conscience or genius, is both literally and figuratively Balkan. Discovering a crack in the building's foundation,

Time is good, he thinks, and time is bad. And he suspects, on balance, there is more bad than good. There are gray days, slow days, quick days, and blue days - smart days and days that are utterly foolish. Perhaps the building will fall on its own, from its own internal weakness, with no help from him, simply crack open and split apart, sooner than anyone knows. It's the Rumanian blood in him that thinks this, the Balkan darkness, always waiting for the next shoe to drop.

The housecleaner Yesenia provides the book's only working-class tale, and it's an ugly one. Her escape into fancy - an appropriately humble one, with a working-class carfare - nets a brutal punishment. But surely the author isn't suggesting that the low-born can't afford to dream their way to a better life. I rather think he's just pointing out that the mean streets can really be mean. Though his New Yorkers live somewhat dreamy lives, Rinaldi's New York is not a modern-day version of Mark Helprin's from A Winter's Tale (though Echo Terrace's rooftop Independence Day party bears a distant relation to Helprin's images of TB victims lying on rooftops all over Manhattan). It's not even Woody Allen's. It's the real thing.