The Imperfectionists

The Imperfectionists
By Tom Rachman
Quercus £16.99, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

What’s it like to work on a famous old international newspaper? An intellectual challenge? An adrenaline rush? Fun, even? Few of the journalists assembled in Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionists would agree. For the most part, they hate their jobs, dislike their colleagues and dismiss the attractions of their life in a beautiful European capital. “Outside is Italy” reads a sign hung by the newsroom exit.

Some of this is down to the state “the paper” is in. Founded in the 1950s, it is a throwback to an earlier age, an English-language publication based in Rome and sold around the world. Though, actually, it is not bought much anywhere these days. Circulation is down to its last 10,000 and the paper doesn’t have a website. As the staff weigh up whether to stay or leave, it’s clear the decision may not be in their hands. In conversations between the ambitious editor, Kathleen, and the board, “payroll cuts” are a primary bargaining tool on both sides. None of this, or the fact Kathleen has “roughly 5 per cent of the resources I need”, diverts her from trying to put out a “non­embarrassing” daily. But it’s not easy. Herman, the corrections editor, rails against falling standards in an internal newsletter plaintively entitled “Why?”, but is unable to prevent the appearance of Tony Blair on a list of recently deceased Japanese dignitaries or a reference to a “genital malaise” in the German economy.

Rachman, who has worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and the Associated Press in Rome, has fun with all this but the minor comedies and tragedies of newspaper desk editors are only a small part of his book. These journalists could just as easily be in banking or in advertising (the influence of Joshua Ferris’s downturn drama Then We Came to the End is certainly present), or in any field that people fight to get into, but then, years later, fight to escape.

Gradually, Rachman colours in the portraits of his dishevelled and disappointed cast. Why does Hardy, the capable business reporter, suspend her objectivity when it comes to keeping a boyfriend? How can Herman, so tyrannical about typos in the office, be so sweet outside it?

The differences between how we act at work and who we are when we leave the office are most clearly hinted at in the story of Arthur, the obituary writer. At the paper he is seen as an oddball and a loner, devoid of any ambition except to leave early each day. His colleagues are unaware that he finds all the fulfilment he needs outside the office. Until one day he receives terrible news. When he eventually returns to work, he will not speak about what has happened but it is clear he has reprioritised what is important. He avoids home, stays late and reveals an unnerving talent for office politics.

Rachman is an admirable stylist. Each chapter is so finely wrought that it could stand alone as a memorable short story. Slowly, the separate strands become entwined and the line characters have drawn between their work and home lives is erased. This is demonstrated most affectingly by Menzies, the workaholic deputy who keeps his enviable domestic set-up separate until workplace humiliation strikes; and chillingly by the accounts manager and the sub-editor she has just made redundant, who find themselves seated next to one another on a transatlantic flight.

The newspaper industry is an evocative setting for these small dramas. Like the characters, it too is self-doubting, wondering how to become something else in order to make it through each day.

But the truth Rachman has nailed in this funny, poignant, occasionally breathtaking novel is that, at work or at home, we need to take happiness where we can find it. Because, like “the paper”, it’s probably not going to last for ever.

Neil O’Sullivan is deputy editor of Life & Arts