The Imperfectionists

It turns out that if it takes me more than a week to read a (relatively short) book, there's a good chance I'm not enjoying that book. Sadly, that's what's been holding me up. I was stuck reading Talking to Girls about Duran Duran. I thought I would love that. I mean, DURAN DURAN! I wasn't as crazy a fan as friend Heather in junior high, but I had all the posters on the wall and in my locker that my meager allowance offered. Plus, it promised to be a pleasant romp through memory lane of that 80s music that more or less formed me. Turns out, not so much. Just couldn't get into it.

Enough about badness and on to the book that I devoured in two days: Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. The story is told by different characters, all working at an international newspaper based in Rome. Each story is a little bit depressing, but it's all set in Rome so you're willing to put up with a bit of dissatisfaction on the part of the characters because you can't beat the gig. That's pretty much how they feel about their lives, too. One character even realizes that the reason he's with his younger, very attractive girlfriend is that he can offer her a nice apartment in Rome in which she can sit around. He says he can't imagine she'd give him the time of day in a cheap apartment in Boston, for example. As difficult as their jobs might (or might not) be, each character seems to realize the luck or the allure of their current positions, even as they angle to do more than say, write obituaries. Each character has a sad little experience or awakening, even if it's not as tragic as the one that befalls the obituary writer, Arthur Gopal, and each story is neatly turns us back to the office.

My favorite character is probably Herman Cohen, partly because his awakening is more positive than some of the others and partly because he's chief copy editor who's internal publication (called Why?) collects all the misspellings and errors made by the writers over the week. I relish that little detail and can relate to it while being grateful that I don't work with such a nitpicker myself.

I did skip one chapter, the one on Winston Cheung, the Cairo stringer, because I could sense it was going to be the sort of chapter that would haunt me, leave me feeling sorry and responsible for this young man's failures. I'm sure it's good, but it's not for me. The revenge chapter towards the end was brutal but kind of fitting, and one I'm sure a lot of randomly down-sized employees could enjoy. I did kind of regret that there wasn't some big bringing together everyone chapter at the end, though there is closure, of sorts. I was just left wanting a little more.

The book is really a collection of glimpses into the slow decline of newspapers in general, but it's a nice little ride. It reminded me a bit of season 5 of HBO' s The Wire, the one that focused on the newspaper in which you got all the personalities, the grasping aspirations of the individual journalists, their realization that they cannot transform lives or their city merely through print, and finally, the end of the newspaper as they know it. That was one of The Wire's strongest seasons, and Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, follows a similar path, in a very different manner. And in spite of the negatives, it still made me dream of living abroad and writing for a living. Just maybe with a bit less personal drama and fewer things going wrong.