Review: The Imperfectionists

I snapped up a copy of this book shortly after it came out and it's been sitting in my massive queue (otherwise known as the tower of books on my nightstand) ever since. I finally picked it up this morning, and read it straight through. I'm not really sure what to say about the novel - it was pleasant enough to read, and managed to surprise me several times but I did not find the story or its telling to be very compelling.

I bought the book for two reasons, the first being that the majority of the story's action takes place in Rome, and from the reviews it sounded as though the city was an integral and important part of the story. I was disappointed in this regard. Though I was familiar with many of the streets and locations mentioned, the names were simply tossed out as irrelevant details meant to dress the novel with the appearance of authority. The author may as well have been lifting streets from a map indiscriminately and the story could have just as easily been set in any other European city. The only details that felt authentic to me at all were the descriptions of Trastevere and the Tiber river, as well as a particular moment in which one of the characters follows the dome of St. Peter's church as far as she can while riding a city bus. One of the female characters spends a lot of time walking down a street called Lungotevere, which literally translates to "along the Tiber". It's a street that winds its way through Rome along the river. It is a residential street and a lovely, quiet place to walk at any time of day. Yet it is characterized in the book as being a rather busy portion of the city, which is not at all true to my experience when I was walking along that street daily to get from an apartment in Trastevere to class in Campo dei'Fiori. Incidentally, Campo dei'Fiori was also briefly mentioned and not described in the slightest. This book sets itself in one of the oldest and most fascinating modern cities on the planet, and the proceeds to tell a story nearly devoid of any description whatsoever.

The second reason I bought the book was that I enjoy stories that are told from multiple perspectives. However, the fragmented storytelling did not really work in this case. Each chapter deals with a different individual affiliated with the same international newspaper based out of Rome. Though some characters make multiple appearances, there is no real sense of cohesion. Each person's individual story is a part of the larger narrative - the story of the newspaper. But by the final chapter, the story still feels like a patchwork of individuals tied loosely together through circumstance. Though I did enjoy the different voices of each storyteller and how they characterized one another, the story itself was bland and boring.

What I usually enjoy so much about stories told in this manner is that it leaves the reader to accumulate data, to file away the different ways each narrator perceives the other players and to build your own model of the story based off of contradictory evidence. You come to know the narrators, to see their biases and motives and how they color the perceptions they pass along in their observations. Eventually, the reader is able to chart all these perspectives as though they were data points, and extrapolate out the "true truth" of the story from all the disparate points of view. But this story simply does not work that way. Each chapter is relatively brief, and doesn't allow much insight into the individual characters. The accumulation of narrators doesn't build one upon the last to create a rich mosaic of perspectives, gaining complexity with each new layer. It's just a jumble of slightly related stories held together by a thin historical thread and brief snippets of the history of the newspaper at the head of many chapters.

All in all, I found the book to be quite disappointing. It was not poorly written. The characters were not poorly imagined. The plot was not uninteresting. If you read the novel as a collection of short stories and character pieces, it hold up reasonably well - especially since most chapters end with clever surprises and upsets. There was simply not enough of anything - the mysteries were not mysterious, the characters were not fleshed out enough to be compelling and the historical pieces of the story did not fit together well. The entire book reads as well as a brick wall would stand without any mortar to bind each individual brick to its neighbor.