Year in (Book) Review: The Imperfectionists

A few months ago, one of my beloved book junkie friends forwarded me a link to a book about to launch, with the note that it had received the most rave write-up in The New York Times Book Review -- by no less than Christopher Buckley -- she'd ever read. (Wow. Alliteration overload. I kind of like it. I'm keeping it. Obviously, since you're reading it.) So I ran out and bought it, because I pretty much run out and buy whatever Ariel tells me to (she's super fashionable, to boot), and saved it for my beach trip. (Much better vacation choice than the last amazing, disturbing book I tried to read while relaxing.)

Not that you all need me to confirm that the folks over there at the NYTBR know what they're talking about, but yes. This was amazing stuff.

Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists is a collection of intertwined short stories, giving readers the tiniest, most intimate insight into the lives of a collection of newspaper people. Interspersed into their stories is the overriding thread of how the newspaper, an Italian-based international daily that's floundering, to put it kindly, came to be. Some of the stories are overtly heartbreaking and some of them are unexpectedly hysterical, but most of them just do an incredible job of putting you right into the lives, or a snapshot of a moment of them, anyway, of ordinary, flawed, wonderful people. They are familiar, and recognizable, and empathetic, and us. Good things happen to them, bad things, sometimes nothing much happens to them at all and it's still riveting.

Even more riveting, I think, is the author's still-very-young life. This is his debut novel (awesome, no pressure on the rest of us there, Tom) and it's insanely good. Check out his background and acknowledge that we're all a little less cool than he is.

This one makes top five for the year so far, for anyone who's keeping track. And if anyone keeping track could let me know that would be so helpful, since I'm not.