Read the words of praise — the Times calls it “spectacular” and the Seattle PI dubs it “magnificent” — on the cover of Tom Rachman’s novel, The Imperfectionists, and you’ll begin to wonder how far our of context they were taken. It’s a bit like the P.R. for a movie like “Speed 2”; the poster says it’s “an action-packed thriller” but neglects to include the rest of the review, which may go something like this: “It could have been an action-packed thriller, but instead ‘Speed 2′ lumbers along like a cruise-ship passenger at the buffet.” Perhaps the Times had really meant to brand Rachman’s book “a spectacular failure”?
No. What the Times’ Janet Maslin really had to say was, ” Mr. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular.” She goes on to call the book “a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun.” One wonders if Maslin was more taken with the detailed, cynical descriptions of the newsroom than with the literary merits of the novel. The Imperfectionists is neither original nor ingenious, unless a compendium of interwoven short stories is your idea of original. The structure, much-used of late and crafted with defter hands by Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) and Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteredge), is hardly anything new. Yes, the vignettes hang together nicely, as each takes a character from the never-named paper (another annoying Rachman tic) as its narrator; and yes, the stories are “unified by an overarching tone” that Maslin identifies as “filled with bonhomie but is punctuated by tough, wrenching flourishes,” but Rachman’s prime achievement is confirming that there truly is nothing new under the sun.
The “wrenching flourishes,” also characterized as “firecracker bang[s] of discovery” by Christopher Buckley in the Times’ Sunday Book Review, are in fact rather pat twists in the stories that in no way put Rachman in the leagues of Roald Dahl or O. Henry, two wonderful writers to which he is compared. Each story in The Imperfectionists is so short and the characters so cursorily sketched that these so-called twists elicit nothing more than an idle “ho-hum.” The paper’s financial officer, stumbling into bed with the ex-employee whose firing she orchestrated, plopped as vulnerably and mercilessly on the mattress as a piece of meat, hears the man’s voice go cold:
“One small thing.” His eyes track down her her body. He proceeds, “Tell me this, Accounts Payable.”She freezes at the name.”Why,” he says, “why of all the people there, Accounts Payable, did you go and get me fired?” He stands at the foot of the bed, staring. “So?” he says. “Explain me that.”
The ending is indeed unpredictable, but it is hardly astonishing enough to be labeled a “firecracker.” Likewise, in another story, when the news editor calls his unfaithful wife’s hotel room to apologize for booting her out of the house, the revelation that the person who answers the phone is not his wife — “It is a man’s voice. It is Paolo.” — is hardly a shocker on the level of Roald Dahl’s “The baby is perfectly healthy . . . Frau Hitler.”
The Times review makes much of the way the vignettes’ titles, headlines from the paper such as “U.S. General Optimistic on War,” subtly play out in the narratives. The parallel between “U.S. General” and the paper’s editor in chief, however, strike me as neither subtle nor especially inspired. Buckley claims that the book is “so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off.” No shabby writer himself, Buckley seems to be resorting to massive hyperbole. It’s not that The Imperfectionists is a bad book; rather, it is simply unremarkable. The reader is left to wonder what exactly Rachman pulled off, and whether he or she has failed in a reader’s duty to appreciate top-notch literature.
The unavoidable conclusion, however, is that The Imperfectionists is more an average, middling novel than a supernova of a debut. Publishing must be in a pretty sorry state if writers like Rachman are compared to “those masters hanging in the museums of Rome” (The Plain Dealer). Rachman certainly has insights into human character, but he spends so little emotional energy on each newspaper staffer that the reader hardly has enough invested in the story to raise an eyebrow at the twist of the ending. Perhaps the betrayal of the news editor’s wife would pack more of a punch if the editor were more than another member of the troupe of narrators that parades in and out of the book’s pages. But Rachman has miles to go before he sleeps, and more points about human foibles to make, so he barrels on, abandoning the hapless news editor save for a few cursory appearances in later chapters.
The greatest sin of The Imperfectionists, it turns out, is not that it is an easily forgettable book. It is that the reviews — “finely wrought” and “occasionally breathtaking,” trumpets the Financial Times — provoked more outrageous emotion than the book itself.
. . . So Well Read. . . 