When you find out Tom Rachman's novel The Imperfectionists is set mostly in Rome, you may think to yourself: Ah, Rome! The fountains! The statues! The history and adventure of a foreign country! The intrigue of living and working there, amongst the purebred romantics!
Then you start reading, and you find out: you're stuck with Americans. American Journalists, at that. Bitter, past-their-prime Americans entrenched in their own self-absorbed bitterness, toiling at a newspaper in its final death-throes. Americans who retain their American-ness so tightly that when they leave the building they say “I'm going to Italy for a minute. Need anything?” You might want to despair, but hold on: This book is pretty darn good. Heck, I almost never enjoy books as much as I enjoyed this one.
Perhaps it's because Americanism, it turns out, is a state of mind, unbounded by our continental shelves. The Americans who populate this collection of intertwinded stories are churlish, childish, short-sighted, bitter, often alchoholic, and fallible in uniquely American ways. Many are so wrapped up in their work and failures they fail to notice: They're living in Rome!
Or Paris, as is Lloyd Burko, longtime French correspondent of the unnamed paper. His is the first story of the collection, and a good introduction to Rachman's ideas and obsessions. He's seventy, with a much younger (fourth) wife, and he's on the downslope of a long, infamous life of unchecked impulses. He's lost his sex drive, but his wife hasn't; she spends most nights with the guy across the hall. His newspaper is out of money, and he's out of contacts, so he taps his son to feed him some dish on the goings on at the local embassy. Trouble is...
Well, things are often not as they appear in Rachman's world. Perceptions dash up against reality in surprising ways over and over again. (For journalists, these people are pretty dense.) But that's fair enough: the paper itself has no real reason for existence except the inscrutable whim of its millionaire American founder. (The story of the newspaper is told in brief italicized passages between the stories, the saga of the Ott family as it passes the newpaper down from generation to generation.) Uncertainty is the sand these people's lives are built on.
The characters are the reason to race through this book, and each chapter delivers a fresh voice, often of people so flawed that in the hands of a lesser writer the book would sink into despair. In a great feat of interior monologe, Rachman tells the story of Ruby Zaga, a bitter, middle-aged alchoholic who hates everyone and everything, as she holes up in a hotel room on new year's eve, pretending to be an American Tourist. She expects to be fired (for good reason) come Monday, and her interior voice is a constant stream of put-downs and insults, punctuated with her own muttered comments in quotes: "She locks her drawer and rakes a shivering hand through her hair, as if to dislodge spiders. 'Such pricks.' It'll feel good when she fucking quits. 'Cannot wait.'" But of course, she doesn't want to quit; the paper is all she has.
The tension between desire and reality is strong throughout all these stories. Winston Cheung, for instance, is a hapless kid who thinks he wants to be a foreign correspondent. He heads out to Cairo, where he stands around waiting for news to happen: “Every day in Cairo, news events take place. But where? At what time?” Then, a seasoned reporter comes to town and sweeps Winston up in a hilarious storm of self-absorption and danger, and Winston has to rethink his goals.
Or consider obituary writer Arthur Gopal, son of legendary writer R.P. Gopal, whose ambition ran out years ago and doesn't care about much any more. His greatest career goal is a job that “pays him to make Nutella sandwiches and cheat at Monopoly with [his daughter] Pickle.” Unfortunately, fate has another future in store for Mr. Gopal. Or Hardy Benjamin, business reporter, lonely and losing hope, who begins af affair with a shiftless Irishman who she meets when both their apartments are burglarized in the same 24 hours. Or the reader who insists on reading every word of every issue, even if it means falling behind, so that the news she is actually reading is years behind the events taking place just outside her door...
Suffice it to say that this book is filled with people in over their heads, and rogue losers on the outskirts of the romantic Europe you're used to reading about. There are affairs, or course, and bad judgement, death, unrequited love and tragedy. But there's such an effusive good-naturedness, and a sure, steady hand to guide you, you'll just be happy you've read this book.
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