'The Imperfectionists' is perfectly imperfect

By Ashley Bene

When you’re bored at work, have you ever tried to imagine what your coworkers’ lives may be like outside of the office? Tom Rachman’s comic novel, "The Imperfectionists," appears to be his inter-office day dreams in print; it’s like a book version of TV’s "The Office," but about journalists instead of paper salesmen.

Broken into sections, each named for the person it is about, the novel explores the lives of the workers who are all connected to an English-language newspaper in Rome. We see a cranky corrections editor, a has-been foreign correspondent, a copy editor who fights sexism in the office every day and a young stringer who makes one mistake after another trying to land a job with the paper.

At the end of each of these sections, there is another story in italics. These are chronological as the novel progresses and tell key events of how the paper started and inevitably died. The last of these sections ties the novel together, as it sums up what happened to each person we read about after the paper shut down. It leaves readers with the beautifully described, yet haunting image of an empty newsroom, the perfect way to wrap up the story.

The layout of "The Imperfectionists" allows you to enjoy it in episodes, only needing to remember who characters are when they are mentioned in other sections. Each section could stand alone as a short story, but since the characters lives are all intertwined and linked through their work at the paper, the stories work together to make a greater whole. The majority of the action takes place outside the newsroom, and it becomes apparent to the reader how little these coworkers know about each other and how wrong their assumptions about each other are. Perhaps this is Rachman’s way of commenting on the increasing lack of communication among colleagues.

On the surface, "The Imperfectionists" is about the death of a newspaper and what happens to its employees in the years and days leading to its demise. Much deeper than that, this is a carefully constructed study of the human psyche that so thoroughly understands each and every one of the variety of characters in the novel it is astounding.

Rachman explores everything about the imperfections of these human beings, down to little quirks like feeling the need to put a hand up in the background of someone’s photo, locking yourself into their memories forever or needlessly popping hard candies in your mouth to get through the day.

One of my favorite sections of the novel is on the Cairo stringer, Winston Cheung. Cheung is trying out for the position as a stringer with the paper, and one mistake after another later, he ends up letting his competition for the position, a much older Rich Snyder, stay with him in Cairo, taking advantage of his young naivety. Snyder gives the kid hints and tells Cheung, “You are getting this job. I have total faith in you,” all while running off with Cheung’s laptop for several days at a time and convincing Cheung to stop working on his application piece to help Snyder research his. Pitying Cheung but laughing all through the section, anyone who has fumbled through the beginnings of a career can relate.

Rachman’s perfectly imperfect characters live and breathe on the page like the coworkers you see in the office every day, making "The Imperfectionists" a must-read for anyone who has ever made an assumption about one of their colleagues.