Stop the presses!

Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists (2010).

Herman Cohen would be the first to point out that Tom Rachman’s debut “novel” about superannuated English-language journalists in Rome, The Imperfectionists, is not really a novel, but a volume of linked short stories. Cohen is the curmudgeonly corrections editor at the newspaper in Rachman’s book. And after pointing out the correct literary category, Cohen would likely trumpet his credo term, “Credibility!”, in harumphing homage to a value increasingly endangered in a sloppy world where even copy editors fail to catch obvious imperfections. But as with many corrections, the goal of perfection may not matter all that much, except to the paper’s dwindling circle of fanatically pedantic readers (like those devotees of Toronto’s Globe and Mail who periodically pronounce themselves “shocked and appalled”).

Whether it’s a novel or linked short stories, Rachman’s tales of the bitterly disappointed hopes and loves of his ex-pat journos are brutal and effective. About the only happy person in the book is the aforementioned blustery Herman Cohen, who enters his overstuffed office filled with bulky reference works, “hikes up his belt, lines himself up with his desk chair, and inserts his bottom – one more bulky reference work returned to its rightful home.”

Once there, Cohen happily sets about pointing out that business reporter Hardy Benjamin erroneously referred to the former dictator of Iraq as “Sadism Hussein”; that the “nitwit” copy editors have permitted the acronym “GWOT” (for  Global War on Terror) to appear in the paper even though “the term should be understood as marketing gibberish” (according to Herman’s ever-exfoliating style guide, known locally as the “Bible”); and that when the phrase “he literally jumped out of his skin” appears in print, it should either literally mean it or the word “literally” should be deleted.

What’s more, Cohen still dotes on Miriam, his wife of several decades; contentedly counsels Kathleen Solson, the latest in a series of editors-in-chief; and whips up bowls of soup, acquacotta di Talamone, with culinary dedication. Cohen’s only imperfection is his besotted view of his boyhood idol, and former classmate, Jimmy Pepp, who’s visiting Herman in Rome.

Jimmy was destined to be the great writer of his generation, and is still working on his yet-to-appear magnum opus, while Cohen settled among the ranks of journalistic drudges. Perhaps Cohen would one day get to write the memoir of Jimmy’s youth and inexorable rise to world literary fame (an A.E. Hotchner to Ernest Hemingway in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir). The deflating disillusionment that follows is one of the sweeter denouements in Rachman’s collection of bittersweet stories (emphasis on the “bitter”).

Speaking of which, there’s the previously mentioned Hardy Benjamin, the mature female business reporter who desperately takes in a 20-something Irish drifter-hippie in the name of humiliating love. There’s editor-in-chief Kathleen Solson, who runs into Dario, her former boyfriend (she’d long ago abandoned him for the sake of ambition). He’s now a PR flak for Italy’s notoriously corrupt Berlusconi regime, but he’s looking surprisingly good despite “temples graying,” and being “slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.” Would it be a journalistic conflict of interest for the editor-in-chief to get too re-chummy with a hack from the ruling party?

Then there’s chief financial officer Abby Pinnola on a flight to corporate headquarters in Atlanta striking up a conversation (and more) with the man in the next seat, Dave Belling, one of the paper’s copy editors whom she’s just had fired, although he doesn’t know it was her doing, or so she thinks as the flirtation deepens. And there’s Ruby Zaga, a copy editor on the brink of paranoia who spends New Year’s Eve alone in a rented hotel room and who’s taken to stalking the aforementioned Dario by cellphone. It gives nothing away to say you can imagine where these sour romances end up. If you can’t, there’s even a dog named Schopenhauer who comes to a bad end in the newsroom — he belongs to the dimwit publisher who announces to his surly staff the closure of this particular edition of the antiquated institution that newspapers have apparently become.

Rachman knows whereof he speaks, having worked as an Associated Press correspondent in Rome and for a couple of years at the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, the enterprise that his unnamed fictional newspaper obviously resembles (except for its relocation to Rome). London, England-born Rachman was raised in Vancouver, and graduated from the University of Toronto (where he encountered the G&M and its shocked and appalled readers), before going on to the Columbia School of Journalism. Much of the fascination of The Imperfectionists, in addition to its page-turning pleasures and crisp writing, is its ongoing sidebar story about the travails of an apparently dying institution. Rachman details the rise and fall of his IHT-like paper – an amorous folly launched by the founder of an American family corporation – in a series of interspersed vignettes that ties together the linked stories, which are mostly about people who get unlinked.

As someone who’s worked for decades at the fringes of print journalism (as a freelance columnist and literary critic), as well as someone with a score of disheartened friends in the business, I can attest to the accuracy of Rachman’s brutal depiction of the twilight of the newspaper industry. Before it became a dying industry, it was a necessary component of the public forum, or so we, reporters and readers alike, told ourselves. But even when it was a public watchdog, it was a private corporation where the bottom line was intently scrutinized even as its journalistic ethos provided the rhetoric of its self-portrait.

In my adopted hometown, Vancouver, the two dailies are owned by the same company, which is itself part of a series of devouring national chains, the latest of which is a near-bankrupt entity, CanWest, and the downtown newsrooms of the Vancouver Sun and Province have been progressively emptied over the years through attrition and buyouts. The papers’ politics have been anything but progressive, and no one resembling a left-of-centre columnist has had a by-line in its precincts since one-time owner Conrad Black denounced the “socialist sludge” sluicing down its op-ed pages. The story is little different at most other North American print dailies (the fiscally precarious, but politically liberal New York Times is the exception to the rule). What remains is the rest of media, which ranges from the rightwing ranting of Fox News on U.S. television to the braver online attempts to be heard above the din of the blogosphere, at cyberspaces like Vancouver’s Tyee, or The Huffington Post in the U.S.

Rachman’s thoroughly engaging book joins a tradition of fictional and non-fictional accounts of journalism that runs from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop in the 1930s to Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men in the ’70s, and is now updated into the newspaper world’s much diminished present. The Imperfectionists made a bit of a splash when it was published last spring (getting good reviews and popping up on a few Top Ten lists). If you missed it, the newly-published mass market paperback is worth catching up with. It reminds us that today, the hallowed cry of “stop the presses!” comes not from a reporter or editor with a scoop, but from the corporation accountant, who means it, as Herman Cohen would note, “literally.”

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Berlin, Feb. 18, 2011

The Northern Name Game

When I took a job as the editor in chief of the weekly newspaper in Chetwynd, B.C., the last thing that I expected to trip me up was my spelling. Aside from my willingness to work in a two stoplight town three hours north of Prince George whose primary exports are coal, lumber, and brawling NHL middleweights, it was one of the things that got me the job. I was born and raised in Vancouver, and until October of last year was enjoying a perfectly cosmopolitan life in downtown Toronto, working as an intern for a major magazine and spending my late twenties in the same condition as most of my friends, a kind of existential stasis defined primarily by the relentless pursuit of cocktails and cool brunch spots.

But the thundering approach of my thirties told me that it was time to get some “real-world” experience, whatever that meant, and so I found myself packing the 1994 Honda Accord my father had generously decided to give me and heading west to Chetwynd. I spent many of my driving hours during the four days it took to cover the 3,000 kilometres between the intersection of Bloor and Bathurst streets and “downtown” Chetwynd thinking about ways in which I might screw up upon my arrival and receive a fist to the face, or worse, for my stupidity. Yet aside from mildly offending the wife of the town’s resident Elvis impersonator by mistakenly thinking that her husband’s self-professed passion was an ironic gesture – I had yet to discover that there’s no such thing as intentional irony up here – I haven’t made any terrible cultural miscalculations in my eight months here. None, at least, that have warranted the aforementioned fist to the face, a commonly used form of feedback in this town and others across Northern B.C.

I have, perhaps even more miraculously, avoided making any major journalistic blunders, a significant accomplishment for somebody who lacks any formal training in capital-J journalism. While I mistakenly assumed that my voice recorder was on in a few situations where it was not, asked a few stupid questions to people who didn’t deserve to have to answer then, and ran some conspicuously mediocre photographs in my first few weeks on the job – to be fair, I’d never had an interest in taking pictures before, much less ones that would go anywhere beyond my facebook profile - I haven’t, to my knowledge, made any errors of practice that couldn’t be described as normal parts of the learning curve. No, my biggest mistakes up here have involved my spelling, one of the few strengths that I thought I had brought to the job. Spelling is something of a lost art these days, of course, thanks to the proliferation of spell-check programs. But I’ve discovered that, at least in Chetwynd, they’ve found a way to defeat these programs.

There are no obvious spellings of first names in Chetwynd, and this is a lesson I have had to learn many, many times over, with predictably angry phone calls or emails from parents upset that I’ve misspelled their child’s name in the town’s only newspaper. Up here, something easy like “Tyler” becomes “Tylar,” and “Jordan” becomes “Jourdon.” Better yet, “Jeremy” becomes “Jermey,” and “Jesse” becomes “Jescey.” These creative spellings aren’t limited to kids, either, meaning that this is no generationally-locatable trend. Among older residents, there’s a Daun, a Suczan, and a Tannia, to name but a few. Chetwynd residents are a predictably conservative bunch, but when it comes to filling out a birth certificate they have a long tradition of transforming into convention-busting radicals.

I am, to be clear, not trying to mock these creative spellings. Upon closer inspection, they have a kind of curious logic to them. In a place like Toronto or Vancouver such apparently deliberate misspellings would produce a relentless campaign of playground teasing for the child and quite possibly a visit from child protective services for the parents. But places like Chetwynd don’t have the cultural diversity of a Vancouver or a Toronto – or even a Prince George – and so creative spellings are a pragmatic way of avoiding the kind of confusion that would be the inevitable result of a class that had seven Tylers, four Jeremys, three Ashleys, and six Jordans, all spelled exactly the same way. More importantly, given the limited pool of family names inherent to any small and geographically isolated community, it circumvents the impossible situation of having two or three children in the same class with the exact same name, first and last. In the Vancouvers and Torontos of the country, multiculturalism is a defining part of everyone’s daily lives, whether they like it or not. In Chetwynd, such opportunities, from an inter-cultural relationship down to something as simple as a steaming bowl of Pho at lunch, simply don’t exist. In their absence, the creative spelling of first names is about as close as they can get to it.

I have, in the weeks and months since I discovered this facet of Chetwynd life, managed to avoid making too many mistakes with first names. I check the spelling every time, even if I presume to know how it should go, and on those few occasions that I forget I am reminded that the naming culture in which I grew up and the unwritten rules associated with it doesn’t exist here. As far as important lessons for a young journalists go, it’s been an interesting and instructive one.

Chetwynd, June 11 – 910 w.