Reading Tom Rachman’s new novel The Imposters (Little, Brown, June) is like witnessing a high-wire alchemy act. Rachman breathes life into Dora Frenhofer, a lonely 73-year-old Dutch novelist, who then breathes life into her characters, who are themselves all writers—of poetry, of stand-up comedy routines, of fabricated news stories and restaurant reviews and sports articles.
Speaking via Zoom from his home in London, Rachman, a 48-year-old journalist turned novelist with a vast store of imagination and empathy, says it all comes back to storytelling—even as he often finds himself wondering if anyone out there is listening. “I sit at my desk isolated from the world, but obsessing about the world, thinking about all the people out there and trying to capture something of it to say. Storytelling itself is still vitally important in so many different forms, but there are endless different competing entertainments and distractions and diversions and cultural flare-ups that mean it’s going to be harder than ever to get people to really pay attention.”
It’s hard not to think there will always be a place for the Rachmans of the literary world. In The Imposters and in his other novels, including the 2010 Rome newspaper ensemble The Imperfectionists, he writes with generous gallows humor about deeply flawed people trying to make sense of their surroundings, often through the written word. His prose conveys a sense of joy, even when it pries into darker corners of human nature. There’s a hunger for, and understanding of, connection that recalls Virginia Woolf, one of Rachman’s literary heroes—particularly her masterpiece about a woman trying to put together a party. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Dora is attempting to gather a group. She’s just doing it in her mind, and on the page.
Rachman has long admired Woolf for her ability to weave the consciousness of multiple characters into a single narrative whole. “Books like To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway have the perspective of the reader leaping from one swirling mind to another, so that they end up becoming this gigantic whirlwind around what might be fairly mundane events,” he says. “But they are full of emotional power because of the depth of feeling of those characters and the different perspectives that are seared into you.”
Dora, who is isolated by the pandemic and her natural, gradual withdrawal from the world, has come to doubt herself and her purpose as both a person and a writer. She warms up a little with each small point of contact with the outside world, but she never seeks such contact. Her true confidants are the characters in her fiction.
Among the wandering souls conjured by Rachman (and Dora) in The Imposters are Beck, Dora’s estranged daughter. She’s a Los Angeles writer who finds herself ghostwriting for a famous comedian; Will, a London bicycle courier who stumbles into a gig editing copy for a sensationalist news aggregator; and Danny, a Brooklyn novelist in mid-career crisis.
Danny’s humiliations are myriad. At an event, he notices a massive crowd outside the hall where he’s supposed to read from his latest book and figures his ship has come in. He is wrong. The Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has been scheduled in the room next door. In another episode, he goes to do a reading at an independent bookstore and nobody shows up. He signs a copy of his novel anyway and is then promptly charged for it, since the store can no longer return the defaced edition to the publisher.
These episodes are borrowed and modified from Rachman’s own experiences. As funny as they read on the page, they circle back to the writer’s anxiety regarding the novelist’s place in the cultural firmament—an anxiety that boils down to a central question, does anyone care?
“Why should they pay attention to me?” Rachman asks. “Do I really have anything that merits more than the shouting going on in the next room? It all ends up leading you to, I wouldn’t necessarily say a crisis, but deep doubt. The solution is the writing itself. And that’s the irony about all of this.”
Rachman is soft-spoken, and has a way of unleashing long, thoughtful, loping sentences as he talks. But the hyper-intelligence comes with no conspicuous ego. He carries himself with a writerly self-deprecation.
Born in London but raised in Vancouver, the son of two psychologists, he says he wanted to write fiction from a young age, but he didn’t feel he had enough life experience. So he studied journalism at Columbia University and got out into the world as an international correspondent for outlets including the Associated Press, for which he reported from India, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere.
“I had no clue about how to do that and no natural talent or skill or particular ability at the job,” Rachman says. “But I thought I could at least travel the world and read more and write more if I could get into that trade.” His goal was to use journalism as a means to polish his writing chops and to see and live in enough of the world to become a good novelist.
Eventually he mustered the savings and the courage to move to Paris and try fiction, supporting himself by working as an editor at the International Herald Tribune. “I lived on very thin baguettes and very thin slices of cheese for a year, and I worked away and I wrote a manuscript that was absolutely terrible,” he says. He tried again, and broke through in 2010 with The Imperfectionists.
Rachman’s writing combines the best of both worlds: the external observational prowess of journalism, and the interiority of literature. The Imposters has both a specific sense of time and place—many places, actually—and a deeper knowledge of human nature and its foibles.
“I am fascinated by what’s happening in other people’s heads, and that was really what drew me in more than the news,” Rachman says. “But the experience of having seen a lot helped me then to write, I hope, with a bit more depth about characters.”
Despite his writerly self-doubt, his work is well worth caring about.
Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer, and was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.
