THE HEWLETT-WOODMERE READERS:
A Monthly Book Discussion Group
2011 – 2012
OUR TWELFTH SEASON OF GOOD
(Please note scheduled dates and times)
Monday, Nov. =
21 at 1
PM: THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by T=
om
Rachman
Discussion Leader: Ed= na Ritzenberg
The Imperfectionists is a novel about the qui=
rky,
maddening, endearing people who write and read an international newspaper b=
ased
in Rome: from the obituary reporter who will do anything to avoid work, to =
the
young freelancer who is manipulated by an egocentric war correspondent, to =
the
dog-obsessed publisher who seems less interested in his struggling newspaper
than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer. – Tomrachman.com
Monday, Dec. =
19 at 1
PM: ROOM by Emma Donoghue
Discussion Leader: Ca= ndace Plotsker-Herman
The narrator of Emma Donoghue’s “Room̶= 1; is a 5-year-old boy who leads a busy life.&nb= sp; “We have thousands of things to do every morning,” Jack tells the reader, and he seems to mean it.= Jack is a smart, eager kid with a great imagination and unlimited energy. But he and his mother= have been trapped in the 11-by-11 room of the title since the day he was born. – New York Times
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![](3D"imperfectionists_files/image002.jpg")
The Paper
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Published: April 30, 2010
This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived = and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figu= re out how he pulled it off. I still haven’t answered that question, nor= do I know how someone so young — Rachman turns out to be 35, though he l= ooks even younger in his author photo — could have acquired such a precoci= ous grasp of human foibles. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrench= ing, and it’s assembled like a Rubik’s Cube. I almost feel sorry for Rachman, because a debut of this order sets the bar so high.
“The Imperfectionists” takes place in
Each of the novel’s chapters is about a particular staffer (or, in= one case, a reader), from the editor in chief on down to a lowly copy editor. T= he stories interlock, or interlace or inter-something. By the end, we’ve come to know the newsroom through a sort of Cubist lens, with everyone view= ed from various angles. Each chapter could stand alone as a short story. And t= he end of each chapter comes, in the manner of O. Henry or Saki or Roald Dahl, with a firecracker bang of discovery. There are also short italicized narratives in between the larger ones, mostly dedicated to the Ott family. I don’t mean to make the book sound overcomplicated or in any way challenging to read. It isn’t, but it’s so intricately construc= ted you may find yourself skipping back and forth to connect the dots and assem= ble the pieces of the puzzle.
Among the cast is Lloyd Burko, a past-his-prime reporter, married four
times, alienated from all his children except one, whom he’s about to
betray as a source, only to find. . . . Well, I won’t give that away,=
but
it’s quite something. Then there’s Arthur Gopal, a sad-sack
obituary writer devoted to his young daughter, Pickle. He’s sent off =
to
Herman Cohen is the paper’s corrections editor, the grammarian and style cop indispensable to any newspaper. He writes thunderous, generally ignored memos about impermissible acronyms, solecisms and misspellings like “Sadism Hussein.” You feel his pain when Tony Blair is included on the newspaper’s list of “recently deceased Japanese dignitaries.= 221; “He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Bellin= g, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wear= s a white ponytail — what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure = that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value= in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?”
Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief, has just discovered that her ne’er-do-well husband is cheating on her. (There are lots of ne’er-do-wells in Rachman’s novel, making one wonder: Is this so very common among newspaper folk?) Kathleen is looking to rekindle an old romance with an Italian, now married and a government press flack: “H= ere he is, temples graying, eyes bagged, slightly handsome but slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.”
The funniest section, which comes off as a cross between Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” adventure, concerns the paper’s helpl= ess young Cairo stringer, Winston Cheung, whose life is hilariously usurped by a fast-talking, on-the-make war correspondent.
Ruby Zaga, the copy editor, is a paranoid Miss Lonelyhearts who alw= ays checks into a hotel on New Year’s Eve so s= he can pretend to be a stranded American business traveler rather than a dateless 40-something with no prospects. She hates her job and is terrified she̵= 7;s about to be fired. She drunk-dials the Italian flack with whom her boss is trying to reconnect. Bad move, Ruby! But Rachman has a way of getting the reader to root for his losers.
Craig Menzies, the news editor, is informed one day that an e-mail photo= of his much younger girlfriend, Annika, naked with another man, has been sent = to everyone on the staff. He confronts Annika, who says she feels terrible abo= ut it all, but now she (and thus he) faces the prospect of being sued by the m= an in the picture — for breach of contract because she had promised to b= uy an apartment with him. Does Italian law actually permit spurned lovers to s= ue? How do you say in Italian, “Is this a great country, or what?” =
One of the strangest but most arresting characters, Ornella de Monterecc= hi, is the Italian press officer’s mother. A kind of Miss Havisham with obsessive-compulsive disorder, she lives alone amid a mountain of clut= ter consisting of every issue of the paper from the late 1970s to the present d= ay. These she insists on reading in sequence. The current date might be Feb. 18, 2007, but in her world, it’s April 23, 1994. When she runs into one of the staffers, she complains about his obituary of Richard Nixon, lea= ving him to scratch his head. Ornella, however, is no mere caricature. There is,= as with Miss Havisham, a terrible personal tragedy to explain her bizarre existence.
The most Roald Dahl-esque episode is granted to Abbey Pinnola, the
paper’s chief financial officer. Abbey, whose job includes sacking the
paper’s employees, finds herself on a plane en route to
The final pages of “The Imperfectionists” unfold as the
newspaper and its staff slouch toward — well, not quite toward
Christopher Buckley’s most recent book is “Losing Mum and Pup,” a memoir.
§§§
The
Book review: 'The Imperfectionists,' by Tom Rachman
By Louis Bayard
Saturday, May 1, 2010
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS
By Tom Rachman
The true protagonist of Tom Rachman's beguiling first novel is a newspap= er, never named, published in Rome but written in English and dispatched to the Earth's remotest corners, where it gives isolated readers "their only = link to the greater world, to the big cities they left, or the big cities they h= ave never seen, only built in their minds." The paper has a distinguished pedigree; its daily ration of 12 pages boasts top-of-the-line reportage; its editors and writers, after serving their time, are routinely snatched up by prestigious stateside publications.
The paper is doomed.
Circulation, never robust, has dwindled to around 10,000. Readers are dy= ing off. Red ink is flowing. The paper's parent company is itching to offload i= t, and its inept young publisher thinks its only value is as a dog-food tray. = For God's sake, it doesn't even have a Web site! And who needs overpaid journal= ists anymore when every patriotic citizen has become his own news gatherer and interpreter?
"The Imperfectionists" is about what happens when= professionals realize that their craft no longer has meaning in the world's eyes (think of all those hardworking monk-scribes idled by Gutenberg) and that the only pe= ople who really understand them are on the same foundering ship, and that, come = to think of it, they really loved that damn ship for all it made their lives h= ell.
We have, in short, a dysfunctional family of expansive proportions. Over there, by the pen cupboard: obituary writer Arthur Gopal, whose "overarching goal at the paper is indolence, to publish as infrequentl= y as possible, and to sneak away when no one is looking. He is realizing these professional ambitions spectacularly." Herman Cohen, the corrections editor, has poured what's left of his soul into a massive style guide aimed= at determining "whether a 'ceasefire' is, properly speaking, a 'cease-fire' or indeed= a 'cease fire.' " Business writer Hardy Benjamin is so desperate to hold= on to her young Irish boyfriend she will ignore the inconvenient fact that he's stealing from her. Spinster copy editor Ruby Zaga brushes up against strang= ers in public just for human touch and is still, months later, stalking the man who, in a weak moment, kissed her.
One by one, these journalists are trotted through their tragicomic hamst= er wheels: hope spinning toward joy, spiraling down to loneliness. This episod= ic structure could easily turn dreary and repetitive if Rachman weren't always finding new ways to surprise us. That tightly coiled chief financial office= r, for instance -- we can well believe she hates talking to people on airplane= s. ("Once, she allowed a fellow passenger to engage her in conversation a= nd it became the longest flight of her life. He made her play Scrabble and insisted that 'ug' was a word.") But who would guess she'd make an exc= eption for the man she has just laid off? And that their post-flight relationship would develop in ways she (and we) never expected?
In "The Imperfectionists," even individual paragraphs have a w=
ay
of twisting off path. An impoverished old journalist named Lloyd Burko paus=
es
in the midst of hunting for stories in
Rachman is a fine observer and a funny writer -- and a writer who knows =
how
to be funny in character. I loved the moment when a shy young American, try=
ing
to win an overseas stringer job, confesses his reservations about
The wire-service reporter who receives this confession will later declare that "good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive." I think Rachman's bittersweet book makes the opposite case. Every individual, from the cuckolded news editor to the frozen-in-amber Italian baroness who's still working through newspapers from 1994, is treated with discretion and humanity. And if a certain soft-focus sentimentality clings to Rachman's el= egy for old-school journalism and its practitioners, it nevertheless embodies i= ts own principle -- namely, that craft can be its own reward. Indeed, these da= ys, it must be.
Bayard is a novelist and reviewer in
§§§
An ink-stained payday;
Being a journalist didn't suit Tom Rachman,=
but it
has rewarded him handsomely. His debut novel, about a newspaper, has hit the
jackpot with rave reviews and bidding wars. Oh, and it's Brad Pitt who's won the film rights, Elizabeth Renze=
tti
writes
BY: ELIZABETH RENZETTI, The Globe and Mail =
(
DATELINE:
In many ways, = Tom Rachman's much-heralded debut novel The Im= perfectionists is the literary equivalent of biting the hand that feeds you. The Canadian writer didn't enjoy his time as a journalist - he was a foreign corresponde= nt for The Associated Press and an editor at the International Herald Tribune - but without newspapers, in all their dying-star glory, he would have no nov= el.
First, there's the fictional setting: A great, grey beast = of a Rome-based, English-language newspaper, not far removed from the IHT, which= is slowly creaking to its knees like a shot elephant. Second, the characters, badly dressed misfits hoping to stave off their inevitable doom, a cast of strivers and slackers familiar to anyone who's sat in a newsroom. And third= , a New York Times review so glowing it might have been written by Rachman's mother, which catapulted The Imperfectionists from first-nov= el obscurity to bestseller loftiness.
"It all feels a bit unreal," Rachman says of the attention surrounding The Imperfectionists. Eight publis= hers engaged in a bidding war to buy the novel; actor Brad Pitt has just snapped up the film rights after another bidding war; fellow novelist Christopher Buckley, in a front-page review in The New York Times book section, wrote that "it is so good I= had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off."
A few years ago, Rachman was in, let's say, a less happy place: He had a
"very bad" first novel on his computer and an unpleasant sensation
that maybe he'd be stuck for eternity at the Herald Tribune, a strange
anglophone oasis in
The irony is rich. His novel - set in a tubercular industr= y, based on a job he never liked - has given him a living he never expected. <= /p>
"I think I'm a person designed to be reading the news
passionately rather than reporting it," says Rachman, who was born in
After studying filmmaking and Italian at the
He noticed that most novels about newsrooms presented journalists either as swashbuckling paragons or jaded hacks, and not as individuals with personal stories as complex as the ones they cover. So he created The Imperfectionists, a linked series of tales about the sta= ff of that dying, unnamed newspaper: the quixotic publisher, Cyrus Ott, whose children don't share his love for his black-and-white baby; the obituary wr= iter who cannot handle actual tragedy; the aging reader, terrified of reality, w= ho lives in a kind of limbo among back copies of the newspaper; the business writer whose orderly stories hide a chaotic love life.
While
While he is at pains to separate out any autobiographical
connections, some of Rachman's disillusionment with the job clearly came when
encountering other foreign correspondents around Europe and
The Imperfectionists is best descr= ibed, to paraphrase Polonius, as tragical-comical. How else could you write a contem= porary novel about newspapers? But <= /a>Rachman, a devoted news junkie, is sanguine about the fu= ture: Journalism will always continue in some form, and a viable economic model w= ill be found to keep it afloat. Just don't ask him how that end might be achiev= ed: An interviewer recently sent him a series of questions, the last of which w= as: "What advice would you give to journalists of the future?"
"We never got to that question, and I was so relieved," Rachman says. "I had absolutely no idea what to say."
§§§
![](3D"imperfectionists_files/image005.jpg")
Discussion Questions
1. The book is a series of vignettes about 11 people in the newsroom of = an unnamed paper. Yet The Imperfectionists is more than collection of short stories. How are the chapters connected? How does the book manage to cohere= as a novel? Or does it? Perhaps you found it difficult to jump from one charac= ter to another—did you?
2. We find out at the end of the book why Cyrus Ott began the newspaper = in 1953. Did you have suspicions all along...or were you caught by surprise?
3. Talk about how the headline for each chapter ties in with the fate of= the character involved—particularly, say, the seemingly unrelated headline for Lloyd Burko: "Bush Slumps to New Low in the Polls."
4. Who are your favorite characters, the ones with whom you most sympath= ize—Kathleen Solson or Herman Cohen, perhaps? Who is the saddest—perhaps Ruby Zaga? What about your least favorite? Overall, does Rachman do a good job of fles= hing out his characters—creating them as fully developed human beings? Do = you come to care about any of them...some more than others?
5. What happens to Arthur Gopal at the end of the story? Why does he suddenly begin to perform beyond expectations? Why does he abandon his wife= ?
6. Why does Hardy never confront her boyfriend? Why does she let him get away with the theft of her belongings? What accounts for her attraction to him...in fact, is she in love with him?
7. Is Dave Bellig's behavior justifiable...or not? Was it fair that he w= as let go...which makes the CFO fair game?
8. Then there's Winston Cheung. Does he learn a valuable life lesson...o= r is he simply duped by a talented con-man? Do you find the story humorous...or irritating?
9. What is the significance of the title?
10. The fictional newspaper in this work serves as a metaphor for the pr= ess in general. Talk about the fate of newspapers— their future survival. What do you think will happen to them and why? What will be the impact of t= heir possible demise? How important is a well-trained, professional press corp to democracy? Is the egalitarianism of news reporting on the Internet a good thing...or not?
§§§
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