Dora Frenhofer, a once successful but now aging and embittered novelist, knows her mind is going. She is determined, however, to finish her final book, and reverse her fortunes, before time runs out. Alone in her London home during the pandemic, she creates, and is in turn created by, the fascinating real characters from her own life. Like a twenty-first-century Scheherazade, Dora spins stories to ward off her end. From New Delhi to New York, Copenhagen to Los Angeles, Australia to Syria to Paris, Dora's chapters trot the globe, inhabiting the perspectives of her missing brother, her estranged daughter, her erstwhile lover, and her last remaining friend, among others in her orbit. As her own life comes into ever sharper focus, so do the signal events that have made her who she is, leaving us in Dora's thrall until, with an unforeseen twist, she snaps the final piece of the puzzle into place.
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.
