Black and White and Read All Over

As his debut novel burns its way up the best-seller lists, Tom Rachman is slowly breaking a thousand journalists’ hearts—maybe tens of thousands of journalists’ hearts. Because Rachman has achieved the dream of reporters across the world who toil long days in the word-mines and pad their despair with fantasies about winning the literary lottery and finally graduating from Anonymous Hack to Universally Respected and Envied (and Preferably Wealthy) Author.

These anonymous hacks long to join that lucky pantheon of writers who graduated from newsprint to hardcover. Some want to be Mark Twain (among his many gigs: travel writer for the Sacramento Union, editor of the Buffalo Express), some Ernest Hemingway (cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star), and most would settle for Ambrose Bierce (crime reporter for the San Francisco News Letter, Hearst columnist). And they all secretly fear becoming Karl Marx (foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, the New York Times of its day), the world-historical genius who only won the literary lottery posthumously. He suffered not only endless poverty and deadlines, but also chronic boils, headaches, and hemorrhoids.

Only one or two hacks in each generation can win that lottery, and Tom Rachman (Asia and Middle East correspondent for the AP, editor for the International Herald Tribune) just pocketed one of the golden tickets.

And that ticket was solid gold. Back in 2008, Rachman’s agent sold The Imperfectionists at an auction between eight different publishers. The Dial Press won the fight and, according to the New York Observer, paid somewhere between a quarter million and a half million dollars. Released earlier this year, The Imperfectionists has already been translated into 12 languages. Last month, Brad Pitt’s production company purchased the movie rights.

It was a smart purchase. The Imperfectionists is built for cinema, and the world is perfectly primed for a smart gallows comedy about the sinking newspaper industry and the eccentrics who are going down with the ship—see, Rachman is not just breaking journalists’ hearts but twisting the knife. He not only won the literary lottery, he tapped the material that hacks know best: the newspaper life. Just when they thought enough time had passed since The Shipping News…

But the hacks’ loss is everyone else’s gain. Like The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (freelance writer on bucolic subjects for Country Journal, Organic Gardening, Yankee, and several others), The Imperfectionists is achingly funny in a wistful, yearning way. Set in and around the offices of a contemporary English-language paper in Rome, The Imperfectionists is written in 11 short chapters with historical entr’acte sections about the newspaper’s founders. Each chapter takes another character’s perspective, but Rachman wrote all of them in third person. The effect is like a camera hovering over one character (a copy editor, a Cairo stringer, a financial officer) for roughly 20 pages before pulling back and zooming down onto someone else. The technique unobtrusively but starkly reveals what ciphers we are to each other. Each character is the misunderstood hero of his or her own story. But when the camera shifts, each is demoted to supporting actor—or just an extra.

The obituary writer, for example, reflects on his interview technique:

He must never disclose to his subjects what he’s researching because they tend to become distressed. So he claims to be working on “a profile.” He draws out the moribund interviewee, confirms the facts he needs, then sits there, pretending to jot notes, stewing in guilt, remarking, “Extraordinary!” and “Did you really?” All the while, he knows how little will make it into print—decades of a person’s life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.

Rachman writes his deep understanding of how we misunderstand each other with a reporter’s efficiency and handiness with a lede. The first lines of the editor in chief’s chapter introduce—and develop—plot and character in a deceptively casual way:

When she realizes that Nigel is having an affair, her first sentiment is satisfaction that she figured it out. Her second is that, despite all the palaver about betrayal, it doesn’t feel so terrible. This is pleasing—it demonstrates a certain sophistication. She wonders if his fling might even serve her. In principle, she could leave him without compunction now, though she doesn’t wish to. It also frees her from guilt about any infidelities she might wish to engage in. All in all, his affair might prove useful.

One paragraph in, and we know a hell of a lot about Kathleen Solson. And how’s that for a first sentence? Profile reporting at its finest.

The Imperfectionists isn’t all pathos, deceit, and misunderstanding. Sometimes love blooms and old wounds are healed. And even its deceits and pathos avoid being out-and-out mean. (Unlike The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, another gallows comedy published earlier this year—there’s a novel with a heart full of bile.) But Rachman is a newspaperman. He understands what makes a good story, and that our most memorable stories rarely have the luxury of a happy ending.

Except, hopefully, for Rachman’s own: a hack whose perceptive debut novel won the lottery, sold for six figures, went on to international acclaim, and became a Brad Pitt property. Knock wood, Tom.