Witty ... Consists of a mix of Frenhofer’s wildly inventive stories about people in moments of crisis, disappointment and revelation, interleaved with Frenhofer’s own diary entries ... Readers who enjoy literary complexity will relish ... Rachman riffs brilliantly on art and the imagination, but he writes best about the human heart.
[Dora's] looming presence throughout can sometimes distract the reader from the plot, and her self-conscious artifice risks undermining these otherwise convincing characters. But the gambit ultimately contributes to a powerful finale ... A woeful tale ... The most writerly creation is Dora herself. The novel’s organizing principle, she seems less an authentic portrait of an aging writer than the projection of a younger writer’s fears about aging.
Desperation is what synthesizes the elements of this novel, as Dora is constantly projecting her own fears and melancholy onto her characters ... The many narrative screens set in place—Mr. Rachman is writing ironically about Dora, who is writing ironically about other writers—establish an overall sense of insufficiency, of hedging. Much of the pathos of The Imposters, one realizes, is meant to spring from its weaknesses, the ways in which the novel fails to fully move and persuade us ... In my opinion, it’s time for this author to write a book without the defense mechanism of metafiction. The fact that The Imposters is so frequently affecting despite its emotional buffers suggests to me that Mr. Rachman is a better writer than he thinks he is, or at least than he has yet let himself dare to be.
The novel is filled with enough twists to make O. Henry blush ... Questions keep the first half of the book humming. Rachman also provides an immersive sense of place ... The disparate plot threads do come together, some meaningfully, some clumsily. When the novel works, one feels the pulse of Dora’s humanity beneath her bitterness as she ties up loose ends. But Rachman has overestimated the reader’s investment in Dora herself. It’s not that she’s unlikable (she is, but who cares?); it’s that he has so completely ceded the floor to those in her orbit ... To delve so deeply and move on is a skill — to be sure, there are many delights in this book — but to intentionally not telegraph which plots are worth retaining means this novel is missing the emotional core of Rachman’s previous work, and there’s an all-you-can-eat Rashomon buffet in its place.
The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages ... Each chapter is a short story in its own right, but when key characters turn up again elsewhere, the connection invariably is with Dora, until you start to wonder whether they might be the creations of this novelist, whose memory is perhaps not as bad as we thought. The Imposters is clever and full of tricks from start to finish. It is also very moving.
Here he offers a convoluted study of a different sort of writer, the ageing novelist Dora, in a treatment that is not unfeeling, though needlessly contorted ... Individually, they are absorbing – but there’s a mystifying fluidity and self-regard to it all, with one unrelated thread leaching into another for no discernible reason. You can lead your readers to truncated plots, but can you make them care?
Each chapter in Rachman’s book is a complete story that connects to the others, even if it isn’t always immediately clear how the stories tie together ... The different stories stories feel depressing, but there’s a bit of sly humor along the way. Some readers may enjoy the book for its literary form as it aims a critical eye at the written word.
Rich and compulsively readable ... It’s all very, very funny too, albeit in an increasingly bleak way ... Smart, thoughtful and beautifully written, studded with aphorisms as pithy as French philosopher Francois de la Rochefoucauld’s...The Imposters is a spectacularly virtuoso achievement and Rachman’s finest novel.
The interplay among various versions of the characters’ links to Dora is fascinating, and Rachman’s prose is lucid and elegant, as always. But the bleak tone throughout, culminating in an appropriately grim conclusion, makes this austere novel difficult to engage with emotionally. Fine, uncompromising work likely to prompt admiration more than wholehearted appreciation.
