By Paul Carrier
The personal and professional lives of staffers at a struggling, English-language newspaper in Rome are the focus of The Imperfectionists, a remarkable first novel that is insightful and startlingly unpredictable.
The Imperfectionists has obvious appeal to anyone (myself included) who has labored in the newspaper business. Author Tom Rachman, who has worked as a newspaper editor and as an Associated Press correspondent, sprinkles insider references throughout the novel.
Paris stringer Lloyd Burko tries to make a story he has written more credible by explaining to his editor that an anonymous government source is a policy maker, not a public-relations hack. An editor obsesses over the paper's style “bible” of writing do’s and don’ts. Obituary writer Arthur Gopal muses that editors’ whims often determine what is newsworthy. And copy editor Ruby Zaga, we learn, is “notorious for inserting errors into stories." Anyone who has earned his keep at a newspaper can easily visualize colleagues with such traits.
But that is not to suggest that The Imperfectionists will appeal to a small subset of readers. This is a psychologically probing look at a collection of complex individuals who must cope with the successes, failures and hardships that fill all of our lives.
Each chapter in this slim, episodic tale zeroes in on a specific employee of the unnamed newspaper (or a reader, in one case), giving the novel the feel of a collection of short stories that are at once self-contained and interrelated. Thanks to the fact that all of the major characters are connected to the newspaper in some way, they pop up in one another's stories, like actors making cameo appearances in a movie.
Adding yet another layer to the novel’s idiosyncratic construction, Rachman has inserted short passages between the chapters, explaining the newspaper’s origins and tracking its evolution over the years.
If all of this sounds a bit unusual, it is, but it works like a charm. The writing is clean and graceful, each employee comes to life in turn and the newspaper itself emerges as a character in its own right. Part of the novel’s appeal is that Rachman somehow manages to create nuanced people in the few pages of their respective chapters.
While some characters experience life-changing epiphanies, others are psychologically bruised and battered by people whom they misjudge. Some are so angry or conflicted it’s a wonder they manage to function. The experiences chronicled here are humorous or poignant, entertaining or heartbreakingly sad.
Rachman pulls all of these strands together as the novel draws to a close, with a conclusion that leaves no loose ends while giving us a glimpse of what the future holds for his characters.
The Imperfectionists is such a masterful accomplishment that the only criticism I can muster involves a petty observation about a character who gets his beloved dog, Schopenhauer, to settle down by giving him a chocolate cookie. "Dogs are allergic to chocolate," I mumbled as I read that passage. But it is Rachman’s rich depiction of his human characters - business writer Hardy Benjamin, corrections editor Herman Cohen, news editor Craig Menzies and the rest - that makes The Imperfectionists such a delight.
The reader of fiction stands aside and watches the characters in a novel, without interjecting the personal motives that muddy our real-life relationships, Rachman says in an interview published in the paperback edition of The Imperfectionists. “The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe,” he says. “And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.” That certainly is the case here.
