The Imperfectionists

In the middle of Tom Rachman's novel The Imperfectionists, Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief of a struggling international newspaper, speaks at a media conference in Rome. Asked whether the newspaper industry can survive the wired era, she responds with familiar assurances: "news will survive, and quality coverage will always earn a premium. Whatever you want to call it--news, text, content--someone has to report it, someone has to write it, someone has to edit it. And I intend for us to do it better, no matter the medium."

I could have written that statement--and in fact, I wrote something very similar in my ninth-grade career report, explaining why the then-distant threat of personalized news content delivered via computer would never drive journalists out of existence. The difference between my youthful self and Kathleen Solson is that I believed those assurances, while she's stuck in a fictional world in which traditional journalism is failing hopelessly.

But not humorlessly. The Imperfectionists is a very funny book that tells the bittersweet story of the life and death of a newspaper through the perspectives of a variety of characters, most of them richly complex and believable: a raw intern gets steamrollered by a manipulative veteran correspondent; a self-centered accountant gets a rude awakening; a grammar-nazi prig shows his warm human side.

The force uniting all these interconnected vignettes, though, is the newspaper itself. Rachman evokes the gritty day-to-day realities of print journalism in a way that will charm those whose understanding of journalism derives entirely from cable news shows, but the book will resonate even more deeply with anyone drilled in the finer points of headline-counting.

Not since Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993) has a novel played so delightfully with the fine art of headline-writing. In that book, Quoyle the inept newsman sees "the commonplaces of life as newspaper headlines. Man Walks Across Parking Lot at Moderate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room." And later:

"Man Dies of Broken Heart."

"Car Disintegrates on Remote Goatpath."

"Stupid Man Does Wrong Thing Once More."

Quoyle himself strikes another character as "a huge roll of newsprint form the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections." The characters in The Imperfectionists are similarly speckled, but the story written on them and through them will survive long after the final newspaper rots in the landfill.