In The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman crafts a portrait of an international newspaper founded in 1954 and based in Rome. His method is original, slowly fleshing out our understanding of the unnamed paper with a series of smaller portraits detailing the lives of its workers and associates. We meet, among others, Lloyd Burko, an aging Paris news correspondent, Winston Cheung, a greenhorn and prospective Cairo stringer, Ornella de Monterecchi, an obsessive compulsive reader, and Oliver Ott, a come-day-go-day publisher oblivious to his father's motivation in founding the paper. Finally, after each character installment, Rachman provides another snippet related to the paper's founder, Cyrus Ott, and its history, imbuing the novel with a sense of mystery and adding a source of continuity.

Every member of the novel's motley crew has his or her own quirks, conflicts, and desires, and these often intersect from sketch to sketch, forming a more comprehensive picture of the paper's operations and atmosphere as the novel progresses. As in life, the characters are endearing and just as often infuriating in their responses to the trials they face, all thanks to Rachman's wit and subtlety in portraying them. I became especially attached, for example, to Arthur Gopal, the obituary writer with a “wonderful nerd” of a daughter named Pickle, who eats Nutella sandwiches and enjoys shopping for antiques. And I wanted to shake Hardy Benjamin, the business reporter who holds on to a crummy hippie boyfriend (his employment is teaching improv classes which are “more hypothetical than real”) because she feels she can't find better companionship. Despite the sample-size nature of my encounters with these characters, there were definite moments of engagement, and I wanted more.

However, it seems appropriate that a novel titled The Imperfectionists, would be, of course, imperfect. I felt as if Rachman's well-imagined work fell short of its potential, ultimately amounting to a series of character sketches that didn't add up to a cohesive whole. I appreciated the humanity with which Rachman sketched his characters-- it was clear that I was meant to sympathize with them-- but at the end of the novel, I did not feel rewarded for doing so. The ending wasn't hopeful, which is not a feature I reject on principle, but its bleakness felt gratuitous, and the original premise of the novel went unresolved. I didn't understand why Rachman had chosen to weave in the story of Ott and his unrealized love Betty if nothing seemed to come of it at the end. Why insert such a thread if it does not tie the story together?-- it must be noted that such a “tying off” is what the reader comes to expect and what the suspense of Ott's story seems to be building toward. The main problem with this book, for me, was that it fell somewhere between a novel and a short story collection without bringing either form to fruition. The individual stories did not resolve themselves because they were interwoven, but the overarching narrative, too, failed to provide this resolution. I felt I had gone to a buffet of delicious caricature hors d'oeuvres, and forced out of the banquet hall before the main course, stomach still rumbling-- but the good news for the chef is that I wanted to bang on the doors, begging to be let back in.