Review | In his ‘virtuoso’ new novel ‘The Imposters,’ Tom Rachman explores the maxim that writers require ‘a sliver of ice in the heart’

From his first novel, 2010’s “The Imperfectionists,” Tom Rachman has always leaned into the Graham Greene maxim that writers require “a sliver of ice in the heart” if they are going to be truly honest about their characters. But in his new novel, “The Imposters,” Rachman is relatively kind to his, even to protagonist Dora Frenhofer, one icy novelist herself. She began her career as a heralded newcomer, and then watched her readership and publisher interest slip away over the decades. Like her direct fictional ancestor — the elderly painter Frenhofer, an Honoré Balzac character who labours for 10 years on a final canvas in search of perfection before he realizes it’s junk — Dora has re-evaluated her past work and found it wanting, the sort of sad fiction “where nothing happens, and then it ends.”

Now 73, bitter, trapped in her London home by the pandemic lockdown, and painfully conscious of cognitive decline — when she types that a stroke victim was “brian damaged,” she knows there’s something wrong, even if she can’t put a finger on just what — Dora strives to craft a final, reputation-restoring novel. It certainly doesn’t turn out as she wanted, but no matter: Rachman offers a rich and compulsively readable alternative. Between opening and closing chapters that feature the writer herself, as well as a bevy of other characters who quickly begin to puzzle readers, Dora spins through time and place. Vignettes, which begin as potential novel openings before being tossed aside for new attempts, are set as far afield as India in 1974, contemporary Australia, and late 20th-century Paris. Bridged by Dora’s astringent COVID-era journal entries and populated by characters who increasingly turn up in subsequent stories, they all dive into Dora’s past.

Her brother, who disappeared half a century before, appears more than once, although not as often as Dora’s estranged daughter. Only once, and with a faint touch, for heart-rending reasons later made clear, does Dora write of a son. Throughout, she is in full writerly mode, carelessly incorporating the details of others’ lives and indifferent to their pain or discomfort. Writers and books abound, the former the most irritating characters (at least for Dora), the latter completed, put aside, tossed in the garbage or otherwise dispatched to oblivion. That’s because Rachman, merciful to his characters — commenting on Dora, and surely himself, he notes “there is more kindness in the writing than in the writer” — does unleash his inner Graham Greene on authorial arrogance, open self-importance and not-so-secret insecurity, spiced by a touch of despair concerning the future of writing and reading in the AI age.

And it’s all very, very funny too, albeit in an increasingly bleak way, a quality that hits a crescendo in Rachman’s description of two characters arriving at an assisted suicide clinic only to find their day upended by the most mundane of problems, an accidental double booking. Smart, thoughtful and beautifully written, studded with aphorisms as pithy as French philosopher François de La Rochefoucauld’s (as collected in his “Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims,” such as: “In growing old we become more foolish — and more wise.”), “The Imposters” is a spectacularly virtuoso achievement, and Rachman’s finest novel.

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