Never before have matters of the newspaper business mingled so closely with matters of the heart as in Tom Rachman’s superb debut novel. Rachman used to be a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Rome, and he still lives there today; so it is fitting that the setting is an international English-language newspaper there. Rachman handles his subject with an elegance and precision that can only come from firsthand knowledge of life as a journalist.
Each chapter introduces a character: writers and editors at the unnamed newspaper, as well as an obsessive-compulsive reader who stores (almost) every issue in her closet. There’s the proud, domineering editor-in-chief Kathleen Solson, who tries to pretend her husband Nigel’s affair (and her employees’ gripes) don’t bother her—“It’s strange to be the boss, knowing they discuss you, doubt you, resent you, and—since they are journalists—complain, bitch, and moan about you”—and then there’s Lloyd Burko, a down-on-his-luck stringer in Paris who submits a fabricated story so he can make his rent and sits idly by as his wife shacks up with the neighbor across the hall. There is the obituary writer Arthur Gopal who, in a bitterly ironic twist, must suddenly face the accidental death of his own young daughter. There is business reporter Hardy Benjamin who, at 36, settles for a relationship with a man who steals from her and, worse, uses her ticking biological clock as material in his stand-up comedy routine.
