(There are lots of ne’er-do-wells in Rachman’s novel, making one wonder: Is this so very common among newspaper folk?) Kathleen is looking to rekindle an old romance with an Italian, now married and a government press flack: “Here he is, temples graying, eyes bagged, slightly handsome but slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.” Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief, has just discovered that her ne’er-do-well husband is cheating on her. During a break, he switches on his cellphone to find 26 missed calls. He’s sent off to Switzerland to interview a dying feminist intellectual. Then there’s Arthur Gopal, a sad-sack obituary writer devoted to his young daughter, Pickle. Well, I won’t give that away, but it’s quite something. It isn’t, but it’s so intricately constructed you may find yourself skipping back and forth to connect the dots and assemble the pieces of the puzzle.Īmong the cast is Lloyd Burko, a past-his-prime reporter, married four times, alienated from all his children except one, whom he’s about to betray as a source, only to find. I don’t mean to make the book sound overcomplicated or in any way challenging to read. There are also short italicized narratives in between the larger ones, mostly dedicated to the Ott family. Henry or Saki or Roald Dahl, with a firecracker bang of discovery. And the end of each chapter comes, in the manner of O. Each chapter could stand alone as a short story.

By the end, we’ve come to know the newsroom through a sort of Cubist lens, with everyone viewed from various angles. The stories interlock, or interlace or inter-something. More’s the pity, since Oliver’s only concern in life is for his basset hound, Schopenhauer.Įach of the novel’s chapters is about a particular staffer (or, in one case, a reader), from the editor in chief on down to a lowly copy editor. By 2004, his grandson, Oliver, will be in charge of the fates of the staff members whose stories make up the novel. The characters are, for the most part, the staff of an unnamed English-language newspaper founded in the 1950s - for reasons not revealed until the end - by an eccentric American businessman with the perfect name of Cyrus Ott.

“The Imperfectionists” takes place in Rome.

I almost feel sorry for Rachman, because a debut of this order sets the bar so high. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching, and it’s assembled like a Rubik’s Cube. I still haven’t answered that question, nor do I know how someone so young - Rachman turns out to be 35, though he looks even younger in his author photo - could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles. This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off.

The imperfectionists by tom rachman