Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists"

    As a general rule, I find it easier to write scathing/critical reviews of books than to write positive ones. I think this is probably true of all critics, at the very least because criticisms seem much more thoughtful and thought-provoking than simple endorsement. That being said, this review will be difficult (perhaps why it's been delayed) because I loved The Imperfectionists.

I encountered the book on one of those Best of the Year lists for 2010 (and then conveniently looked for it in a bookstore right around the time it came out in paperback). The review I read didn't mention, or I didn't realize, that it was actually a collection of interrelated short stories. I think it's probably for the best that I didn't know this beforehand, or I would have been prejudiced against it. More often than not, I find short stories slightly melodramatic - trying to pack a punch into a short space. This is compounded by short story collections - it's the length of a book, but it's just fifteen-odd  punches to the tear ducts. This was not the case with The Imperfectionists (see how I write positive things by denouncing criticisms? Cheap shot).

The collection follows an international English newspaper based in Rome. Each of the stories follows one of the contributors to the newspaper (field writers, editors, accounting, copy writers, owner, reader, etc) and the stories are interspersed by short vignettes that follow the start of the newspaper. Rachman's gift is to make each of his characters so vibrantly alive that when they pop up in each other's stories, you feel like you're encountering somebody you know intimately. The challenging part of reading their stories is that Rachman makes you feel connected to them, sharing their hopes and dreams, so that when something goes wrong or (more mundanely) the hope doesn't materialize, you feel let down. For me, this meant I often needed to pause after reading each story before starting the next one - not just to get out of one character's head but to adjust to the disappointment I shared almost viscerally with these fictional characters.

As the stories progress, Rachman slowly develops the decay of the newspaper. The first story follows Lloyd Burko, a field writer stationed in Paris, which I thought was a really good way to begin. Lloyd's personal life is crumbling as his third (and much younger) wife slowly leaves him for the man across the hall and so he finds his professional work that much more difficult. In Lloyd's story, the newspaper in Rome comes off as a solid institution. Towards the end of the book, however, we encounter reader Ornella de Monterecchi  who has collected every paper published for some twenty years and is slowly reading every article (she is currently maybe fifteen years behind present day). I found Ornella's story an interesting look at the problems facing the newspaper industry - by the time the paper makes it to the stands in the morning, all of yesterday's news is incredibly old and so the papers are only worthwhile to people like Ornella living in the past.

All in all, as I promised, a weak review to balance out a wonderful book.