REVIEW: *The Imperfectionists* by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. 272 pp. Dial Press, 2010.
My rating: 5 stars out of 5

Note: This review DOES NOT contain spoilers. Read away with no worries!

The Imperfectionists is stunningly good. Over the course of eleven chapters, Tom Rachman takes us into the hearts and minds of a variety of characters, each of whom has some connection to an English-language international newspaper based in Rome. It's a diverse cast of characters, ranging from the newspaper's publisher, to the editor-in-chief, to a corrections editor, to a faithful reader. Each chapter presents one facet of the overall enterprise, yet is complete and perfect enough to stand on its own as a short story.

The characters are beautifully drawn; some of them are the most memorable characters I've come across in years. For example, there's the hilariously inept Winston Cheung, an insecure 24-year-old who's trying out for a stringer position in Cairo. So nervous that he can't take notes during his first interview with a Palestinian official, he winds up padding his story with lengthy asides about the official's goatee and a passing ice-cream vendor--and includes this all-time great example of purple prose:

"As he spoke, the yellow Egyptian sun shone very brightly, as if that golden sphere were blazing with the very hope for peace in the Middle East that burned also within the heart of the Palestinian undersecretary for sports, fishing, and wildlife."

Then there's Ornella de Monterecchi, the newspaper's most faithful reader. Like a modern-day Miss Havisham, this well-to-do elderly lady is hopelessly stuck in the past. She spends her days reading the paper and, unfortunately, requires a full two days to get through each daily edition--yet refuses to skip ahead. Rachman writes:

When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.

She doesn't own a television and each day her maid enters the house with the day's newspaper hidden in a plastic bag, to be filed away in a cabinet for reading at some point in the distant future.

But as wonderful as many of the human characters are in The Imperfectionists, the main character of the book is the newspaper itself. At the time of the novel, the first decade of the 21st century, print journalism was being supplanted by the Internet and the slow death of print journalism serves as the novel's backdrop. In fact, in some ways, The Imperfectionists is as much an elegy as it is a novel.

This isn't to say that Rachman romanticizes the newspaper business; far from it. All of the faults of the never-named Roman newspaper of his novel are laid bare, from the grimy carpeting beneath it all to the inept management at the top. Published typos and errors of fact abound. It's a messy operation, on its way out, yet we can't help but admire the audacity of it all: on a daily basis, a band of highly-intelligent individuals come together and make sense of the world, more or less, on twelve pages of newsprint.

This peculiar trait of the newspaper--being full of flaws yet worthy of admiration--extends to the characters, as well. Like the paper they are connected with, many of them are broken, malfunctioning, and on the way out. They are, indeed, imperfect. Yet Rachman does such a wonderful job of bringing them to life that we read their exploits with both sympathy and delight.

This is a superb novel, written with wit and precision, and not to be missed. It's hard to imagine how Rachman could've done better. For being one of my best reads of 2014, I give it five well-deserved stars.