Trigger warnings for brief scenes of torture and suicidal ideation.
As I read The Imposters, the brilliant new novel by Tom Rachman, I couldn’t help but think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. In Mother Night, the protagonist did terrible things while posing as a Nazi, arguing ever afterward that he was only pretending in order to do good things. The novel has its flaws but it sticks in my memory as a story about how what we pretend to be can effectively become who we are. The Imposters is also a novel about what we pretend to be. Unlike Mother Night, however, Rachman takes us underneath the veneer of those pretensions to reveal quivering fear and insecurity. It is one of the most unsettling works of literary psychology I’ve ever read.
The Imposters revolves around unsuccessful (not to say failed, exactly) author Dora Frenhofer. Dora is best known for one book, her memoir, which is the one she hates the most. Her fiction never really took off but critics noted that Dora has a remarkable talent for observing her fellow human beings. We meet Dora near the end of her long life. She’s started to mix up and forget words. Even though she’s in relatively good shape for an elderly woman these symptoms make her believe that she’s about to begin a precipitous decline. So much so that Dora starts to give away her possessions and “prepare” for the end.
We learn all of this—and many other things about Dora’s long, lonely life—through a curious montage of diary entries and stories of people who intersect with Dora. The structure of The Imposters strongly reminded me of another twentieth-century classic: If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. In Calvino’s novel, we follow a pair of readers who have to keep exchanging books because they always get the wrong one. Both The Imposters and If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler jump from genre to genre with each chapter, playing on our human tendency to try and find connections between things even if the only thing that links them is proximity. The Imposters makes it easier to spot connections. The more we learn about Dora, the more we see similarities between her, her life, and the myriad of people in the book’s chapters. There are so many similarities that, in the end, one has to wonder just how much of the preceding book was reality and how much was a product of Dora’s imagination as she tries to get out just one more book. Spotting the connections and similarities made my English major heart very happy; I love a metafictional puzzle.
Above all the small coincidences and similarities between Dora and her characters (people who stumble in and out of her life?), there is one major theme. Nearly every character in this book is an imposter of some kind or suffers from imposter syndrome. While all of these characters is putting up a front of success or forgiveness or at least basic functionality as a human being, we get to look beneath the surface to see all of their worries. The author who’s finally been invited to attend a literary conference wrestles with his desire to be respected by other literary fiction authors against his desire to be a bestseller, even if it means writing genre fiction. A father worries and frets that his worst secret will come out if his son and his son’s half-sister become friends but attempts to act as though nothing is wrong. A comedy writer flirts with turning to the dark side by possibly parlaying a cancel culture scandal into financial success. None of these characters feels repetitive; instead, each telling of imposture is like looking at different manifestations of insecurity or trying to deal with difficult emotions solo.
This book will delight former English majors, given all the literary gems there are to uncover. I also think this book might be a tonic for people suffering from imposter syndrome themselves. The Imposters is almost like a literary therapy session—uncomfortable, sure, but it might hold some insight that we can use to shake off self-imposed feelings of failure and confusion about what we are or ought to be.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.