Review: The Imperfectionists

Clever mesh: Tom Rachman provides an insightful look into the life of a newspaper. Photo / Supplied

This full and funny first novel, set around a Rome-based English-language newspaper, comes with faux reporters' room coffee stains on the cover. It also comes with (semi-) appropriate newspaper headings for its chapters: Bush Slumps to NW Low in Polls; World's Oldest Liar Dies at 126; Kooks With Nukes; Global Warming Good For Ice Creams.

Each chapter tells the story of a different newspaper employee. There's Herman the Corrections Editor, obsessed with updating his Style Guide (currently holding slightly over 18,000 entries). Goal-obsessed, work-obsessed Kathleen the Editor-in-Chief, calculating how to exploit her husband's infidelity while she attends a media conference at the Rome Hilton. Lloyd the Paris correspondent, who missed reporting on the 1968 riots because he was drunk in the bath with a lady friend.

There's many more, interspersed with flashbacks to the 1950s and the semi-spontaneous, semi-drunken beginnings of the paper. There's News Editor Craig, the balding worrier; Winston the would-be Cairo stringer, with his background in primatology; Ruby the hygiene-obsessed Copy Editor, with her doctorate in theology; Clint the Culture Editor, "a dandruff-raining, baseball-obsessed, sexually-resentful Alabamian with a toothbrush moustache".

Rachman's clever mesh of cross-referencing builds his characters' back stories, personal lives and professional roles until the whole organism of an ageing, struggling newspaper stands proud and precarious in front of you, changing and growing right up to the tacked-on but affecting epilogue.

There's excoriating revenge on a bully, staff cuts that culminate in a very chilling brief encounter, a gloriously repulsive free-loader, touchingly second-best satisfactions and slovenly, career-abandoning happiness. There are memorable - if debatable - lines: "Journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males."

The author knows, likes and despairs of newspapers: the skills, idealisms and compromises that make each issue; the way their demands invade private lives; the fact that "news" is often a synonym for "editor's whim".

He's both testing and tender towards his people - their loneliness and purposelessness, moments of cleaving awareness ("one day, his son will die"), capabilities for love and commitment, devotion to kids, awareness of the fading future of a faded friend. It's convincing and compassionate; amusing and affectionate. In fact, it's a bit of a jewel.

* The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman, Text Publishing $38.
Reviewed by David Hill