Tom Rachman: Live

Tom Rachman

A month ago, I wrote about the former journalist Tom Rachman and his impressive debut novel, "The Imperfectionists." Tonight, Lori and I will go see him at a local bookstore, joined by our friends Bob and Deb, who enthusiastically recommended the book in the first place.

I'm looking forward to a great evening. We've known our Salem friends since we all became parents 30 years ago, but it's been a while since the four of us got together. Dinner before the author's reading at Powell's Books will give us some time to catch up. The reading and Q&A afterward will give us a glimpse of Rachman's personality and a chance to discuss a book that three of us have read.

Actually, I have a sense of what's coming, based on an excerpted conversation that I came across late last year. Random House Reader's Circle published a one-on-one conversation between Malcolm Gladwell -- the author of "The Tipping Point" and other best-selling books -- and Rachman that's pretty interesting. Read it here.

For one thing, turns out the two men have a lot in common. As Gladwell notes: "We were both born in Britain and moved to Canada as boys. Both our fathers are professors, and our mothers are therapists. We both went to the University of Toronto, and we both moved to the United States after graduation to work in the newspaper business. We’re the same person!"

Malcolm Gladwell

For another, Gladwell asks an intriguing question about the group of flawed but sympathetic characters who populate Rachman's novel -- reporters, editors and executives who work for an old-school international newspaper in Rome that's edging toward obsolesence in the digital age.

Gladwell: I was bracing myself for the kind of romanticization that inevitably creeps into books or movies about the newspaper business. But it never happened. ... (H)ow did you manage to make a portrait of, as you say, the “lesser drives” of journalism, so generous?

Rachman: To form these characters, I tried to conceive of their motives, resentments, disappointments; I watched them gazing unhappily into the mirror, or wincing at office slights. Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What’s remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives. What I wonder is whether any of this sympathy for fictional characters translates into greater sympathy for people in life. What do you think? Looking back on novels and stories you’ve loved, do you think they affected how you see people?

Since reading this snippet, I've been more conscious of the question Rachman poses. Why is it that I can read a work of fiction and sympathize with the disappointments and insecurities of make-believe characters but I can't do the same for the folks who sit outside grocery stores, coffee shops and thrift stores in my neighborhood, with their handwritten signs, attesting to their lack of a job, a home or even hope? Am I less compassionate? Or have I had it drilled into me that handouts do nothing to solve a panhandler's predicament?

Those are questions I hope to raise sometime this evening, certainly at dinner, maybe even at the reading.