The Imperfectionists

There's been much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands about the fate of the newspaper. While Tom Rachman does not directly address that issue in his lovely novel The Imperfectionists, I felt the issue hovering over the action like a gathering storm cloud.

The setting is a shabby English-language newspaper based in Rome, kind of a third-rate International Herald Tribune. Rachman tells his story in a series of inter-connected chapters that each feature an employee of the paper (or, in one instance, a reader). These chapters range from the comic to the tragic, sometimes inside one chapter. I guess the term for it is serio-comic, or it could just be called life.

There is full range of characters--the driven editor-in-chief, Kathleen Solson; the news editor, Cameron Menzies, who is amazingly married to a young and beautiful woman; the bitter and lonely copy editor; the lazy obituary writer who experiences a life-changing moment; and the bumptious corrections editor who delights in calling his underlings nitwits.

The funniest chapter belongs to a potential stringer in Cairo, a young man who decided to give up studying primatology and become a journalist, even though he knows nothing about it. He ends up being bulldozed by a professional foreign correspondent who ends up taking his laptop and his house keys. The most surreal chapter involves the reader, a bit of a sci-fi section where the woman takes several weeks to read each paper, cover to cover, and thus is several years behind in the news. Since she has no other news source, she lives in a kind of time warp, not knowing current events except those that occurred a decade earlier.

The prose is crisp and deliciously-rendered. I turned down a corner on a couple of passages, but here is the opening of the chapter on the bitter copy editor, Ruby Zaga: "The jerks took her chair again, the chair she fought for six months to get. It's amazing. Just amazing, these people. She hunts around the newsroom, curses bubbling inside her, bursting out now and then. 'Pricks,' she mutters. She should just quit. Hand in her resignation. Never set foot in the place again. Leave these idiots in the dirt." As a copy editor myself, that is spot-on, folks.

Interspersed among the chapters are snippets of the history of the paper, and the books ends with the ineffectual grandson of the founder as publisher, who's avoidance of business issues shrouds the ending in a bleak layer of pessimism. As his older brother tells him, "You don't even have a website. How can you expect revenue without a Web presence?"

I have no idea if the newspaper will last. I expect they will through my lifetime, which is good, because there's nothing like handling actual newsprint. The Imperfectionists understands that feeling, and pays tribute to it, however melancholically.