by Kelly Pickerill
When I read the front page review of the NYT Book Review on The Imperfectionists, I must admit I started a bit; Christopher Buckley’s cloyingly sweet words about Tom Rachman’s first novel were almost as shocking to read as the front page Ian McEwan review which denounced his book, Solar, to be so well-written as to be positively boring.
Just like I had to read Solar for myself (and I admit I got stuck about 100 pages in, though I haven’t given up), I had to read The Imperfectionists to see how a respected writer could justify such effulgence, one, and then how a usually staunch weekly, two, could justify front-paging what reads like a blossoming schoolgirl’s heartthrob-devotion.
The opening of the review sounds like a dust-jacket blurb and, at that, one written by a writer who may want a favor later:
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 figure 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 looks even younger in his author photo — could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching, 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.
Well, parts of this quote did in fact make it to the jacket cover, and it reminds me of another gushing jacket blurb, which didn’t ever appear in a review, but whose sentiment I find to be similarly fanatical:
Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up, but still want to leave your own world and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.
That’s Dave Eggers on Daniel Handler’s Adverbs (Handler is also known as Lemony Snicket to the younger set), a book I thoroughly enjoyed, though I read this quote as another precocious part of a light-hearted book, and wouldn’t have expected to see it in a serious publication.
All this to say, while he may have gone a bit gushy, after reading The Imperfectionists, I don’t believe Buckley was wrong. A bit enchanted, though, maybe, for which I don’t entirely fault him. The Imperfectionists is an enchanting book. It’s written as a series of connected vignettes, each focusing on one person who works for (and, in one case, reads) an international newspaper.
Buckley is right; the characters’ stories do intertwine in surprising ways, and though sometimes Rachman’s devices can become a bit transparent, I forgive him that, because the characters, despite some of the faux-naïf situations Rachman puts them in, are so realistically portrayed it feels as if they’re in the room with you (bathroom reading may not be advised). Buckley didn’t see fit to quibble with this problem, opting instead to compare the devices to some of the greats: Roald Dahl, O. Henry, Evelyn Waugh, Hunter S. Thompson. In the review, he writes a little about a few of the characters in the novel, holding back at the end of each of his paragraphs with different variations of, “You’ll just have to see for yourself!”
But more than the characters’ stories, it’s their imperfections that link them. The (arguably) most tragic character we don’t meet till the end of the novel — the paper’s current (in 2007, when the novel’s set) publisher, Oliver Ott. The grandson of the paper’s founder, Oliver doesn’t read the paper, doesn’t have any more contact than is necessary with its employees, and doesn’t attend the board meetings that decide its fate. While the other characters’ isolation is briefly reprieved by their attempts (even failed ones) to connect with the people in their lives, Oliver only has eyes for his dog, a basset hound named Schopenhauer. Staring at a Turner in his grandfather’s mansion, he tells Schop, “Beauty is all I care about.” Yet when he gazes at the faces depicted in the painting, he’s repulsed. “How can people be attracted to each other?” he asks. Oliver’s tragedy lies in his inability to answer this question, which the other characters, in our brief entries into their lives, at least attempt to find.
I wouldn’t be so portentous in my predictions for the rest of Rachman’s career as a novelist as Buckley; The Imperfectionists indicates that he has a grasp of human weakness and triumph that surpasses many already, and can only improve, in my opinion.
But! Here are some curveballs about Willie McGee’s story that have led to The Eyes of Willie McGee: well, first of all, a lawyer from New York was hired for him by the Civil Rights Congress and so he got loads of attention. His case was actually pleaded – and Americans like William Faulkner and Norman Mailer began speaking out about it. This was the budding (if that) Civil Rights movement, though, and despite going all the way to the Supreme Court and being investigated by the FBI, Willie McGee still faced the death sentence. He was executed in Mississippi’s ‘Travelling Electric Chair” in 1951. It was – another curveball – recorded by a 20-year-old college student named Jim Leeson, who wasn’t at the execution but rather recorded it off of the radio. Leeson was later a professor at Vanderbilt, and played the recording for some of his students – among them Alex Heard. Twenty-five years later, Heard began investigating a bit more into McGee’s story, found out nobody had ever spent too much time investigating it, and began working on what is now his book. It’s a fascinating story, unusual but familiar in so many sad ways. NPR did a feature on McGee’s story recently – read about it here.
If you are looking for romance and mystery, read 
Lee Child warned an enthusiastic audience that he was not going to read from his new Jack Reacher novel, 
