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. 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. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching, and it’s assembled like a Rubik’s Cube. I almost feel sorry for Rachman, because a debut of this order sets the bar so high.
“The Imperfectionists” takes place in Rome. 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. By 2004, his grandson, Oliver, will be in charge of the fates of the staff members whose stories make up the novel. More’s the pity, since Oliver’s only concern in life is for his basset hound, Schopenhauer.
Each 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. The stories interlock, or interlace or inter-something. By the end, we’ve come to know the newsroom through a sort of Cubist lens, with everyone viewed from various angles. Each chapter could stand alone as a short story. And the end of each chapter comes, in the manner of O. Henry or Saki or Roald Dahl, with a firecracker bang of discovery. There are also short italicized narratives in between the larger ones, mostly dedicated to the Ott family. I don’t mean to make the book sound overcomplicated or in any way challenging to read. 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.
Among 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. . . . Well, I won’t give that away, but it’s quite something. Then there’s Arthur Gopal, a sad-sack obituary writer devoted to his young daughter, Pickle. He’s sent off to Switzerland to interview a dying feminist intellectual. During a break, he switches on his cellphone to find 26 missed calls. His life is about to change.
Herman Cohen is the paper’s corrections editor, the grammarian and style cop indispensable to any newspaper. He writes thunderous, generally ignored memos about impermissible acronyms, solecisms and misspellings like “Sadism Hussein.” You feel his pain when Tony Blair is included on the newspaper’s list of “recently deceased Japanese dignitaries.” “He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail — what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?”
Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief, has just discovered that her ne’er-do-well husband is cheating on her. (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.”
The funniest section, which comes off as a cross between Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” adventure, concerns the paper’s helpless young Cairo stringer, Winston Cheung, whose life is hilariously usurped by a fast-talking, on-the-make war correspondent.
Ruby Zaga, the copy editor, is a paranoid Miss Lonelyhearts who always checks into a hotel on New Year’s Eve so she can pretend to be a stranded American business traveler rather than a dateless 40-something with no prospects. She hates her job and is terrified she’s about to be fired. She drunk-dials the Italian flack with whom her boss is trying to reconnect. Bad move, Ruby! But Rachman has a way of getting the reader to root for his losers.
Craig Menzies, the news editor, is informed one day that an e-mail photo of his much younger girlfriend, Annika, naked with another man, has been sent to everyone on the staff. He confronts Annika, who says she feels terrible about it all, but now she (and thus he) faces the prospect of being sued by the man in the picture — for breach of contract because she had promised to buy an apartment with him. Does Italian law actually permit spurned lovers to sue? How do you say in Italian, “Is this a great country, or what?”
One of the strangest but most arresting characters, Ornella de Monterecchi, is the Italian press officer’s mother. A kind of Miss Havisham with obsessive-compulsive disorder, she lives alone amid a mountain of clutter consisting of every issue of the paper from the late 1970s to the present day. These she insists on reading in sequence. The current date might be Feb. 18, 2007, but in her world, it’s April 23, 1994. When she runs into one of the staffers, she complains about his obituary of Richard Nixon, leaving him to scratch his head. Ornella, however, is no mere caricature. There is, as with Miss Havisham, a terrible personal tragedy to explain her bizarre existence.
The most Roald Dahl-esque episode is granted to Abbey Pinnola, the paper’s chief financial officer. Abbey, whose job includes sacking the paper’s employees, finds herself on a plane en route to Atlanta, headquarters of the now troubled Ott Group, seated next to a man she’s just canned. I won’t say more, other than that the end of her story provides that sudden intake of breath reminiscent of Dahl at his sang-froid-est.
The final pages of “The Imperfectionists” unfold as the newspaper and its staff slouch toward — well, not quite toward Bethlehem. Although Cyrus Ott’s son and successor as publisher, Boyd, is a cold fish, Rachman manages to gin up some sympathy for him. But it’s left to Boyd’s son — Oliver, the basset owner — who never bothers reading the paper over which he nominally presides, to provide the novel’s ultimate punch. One day Oliver comes across an old letter of his grandfather’s, disclosing the real reason he started such an improbable newspaper in the first place. Does Oliver care? Not in the least. He’s preoccupied with ordering fancy veal dinners for Schopenhauer and reading aloud to him from “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The scene in which he comes to the offices to announce. . . . Well, I’ll let you read it yourself. Perhaps even, as I did, twice.
