It feels as if they are talking about or thinking of their lives, as opposed to being in them-the sense of being kicked in the gut or feeling the shattering of one’s dreams was sorely absent from the narrative, even in moments of intense loss or heartbreak. He provides the essentials of who, what, when, where, and why (like a good reporter), but tends to minimize the impact that events and relationships have upon the characters. Rachman takes us into the minds, self-doubts, and insecurities of the newspaper world, but finds it difficult to get underneath the characters’ skins. Anyone who has ever spent time in newspaperland will recognise The Imperfectionists high degree of authenticity.
Then there is the novel's faint yet persistent resemblance to Joshua Ferris's And So We Came to the End, much of whose obliquity and ground-down communal spirit it shares. At the same time there are drawbacks to the short-story-collection-as-novel form, particularly one set around a newspaper, where the metaphorical tide can sometimes sweep in a little too violently for comfort. All this is played out with – in most cases – a fair degree of subtlety. To move his story forwards, Rachman offers 11 representative figures, whose personal lives are intimately connected to the paper's slow decline. If Tom Rachman's first novel has a flagrant drawback, it's that his account of some of the tribulations facing the modern newspaper man (and woman) is unlikely to send any wide-eyed recruits scampering towards what on this evidence is a deeply neurotic profession.
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