Icarus Risks
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Analysis
Rachman is a writer. He is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, has served as a outside pressman for the Associated Press, and worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune. In his start book, The Imperfectionists, there are no unearned inventive flights, no indulgent Icarus risks. He reports strictly on a man he knows: the untidy lives and abrupt declination of journalists and journalism, and their reciprocative failures, flaws, and fulminations. Far from perfect — Rachman has given himself an eponymous out — it is a solid hurt book of humbly cautious aspiration.
Abstract
Set against the gorgeous scene of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, spirited beginning follows the topsy-turvy backstage lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English languagenewspaper as they endeavor to protect it, and themselves, afloat.
Fifty years and more changes have ensued since the press was founded by an enigmatical millionaire, and now, amid the discolored carpeting and grungy office furniture, the body’s personalized dramas seem far more strategic than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editorial director is smarting from a dishonesty in her open marriage; Arthur the lazy obit communicator, is changedby a private tragedy; Abby, the crenelate financial functionary, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most sudden way. A little crazy, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his close byline, patch the new Cairo stranger is unmercifully manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an oversize ego. And in the shadows is the segregated young publisher who pays more work to his prized basset hound Schopenhauer than to the doom of his family’s quirky paper.
As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect gang stumbles toward an unsettled future, the newspaper’s abundant record is revealed, including the stunning factson its founder’s intentions.
