A choice of first novels | 7 August 2010

Write what you know. Isn’t that what aspiring novelists are told?

Write what you know. Isn’t that what aspiring novelists are told? While two first-timers have taken the advice this summer, there is also an exception to prove the rule.

In The Imperfectionists (Quercus, £16.99), Tom Rachman draws on his time at the International Herald Tribune to write a quirky patchwork tale of an English-language newspaper based in Rome. Cyrus Ott, helmsman of an American industrial dynasty, chronicles the paper’s fortunes, from its inception in the 1950s to the Noughties. Interspersed are the stories of the various reporters, editors and readers whose lives are anchored to Cyrus’s grand enterprise on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.

They make for a hapless bunch. There’s the ageing Paris correspondent, slowly fading into obscurity in the city of light, the obituaries writer, with one foot in the professional grave, and the young Cairo stringer, railroaded by a visiting war reporter. ‘Take a deep breath, Dude!’ says Mr Gung Ho as he steals both the sucker’s byline and his laptop.

Rachman details his profession with an eye on the tragicomic. Cobbled-together obituaries find a ‘final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather’. Herman Cohen, the corrections editor, stalks the floor chanting his mantra: ‘Credibility! Credibility!’ He’s a one-man barricade against mangled grammar and dubious lingo. ‘GWOT,’ he points out with exasperation,

stands for Global War on Terror. But since conflict against an abstraction is, to be polite, tough to execute, the term should be understood as marketing gibberish.

Ultimately, this fine debut focuses on the bittersweet inevitability of the twilight. The impermanence of passions and worries is the refrain. ‘At newspapers,’ the news editor explains, ‘what was of the utmost importance yesterday is immaterial today.’