The Imposters

Rachman returns with a droll if uneven novel in stories, the form he used with such brilliance in The Imperfectionists, this time charting the lonely days of a Dutch novelist. Dora Frenhofer, it seems, is inventing fictional characters to replace the people no longer in her life. In her commitment to writing, she’s spurned friends and family, including her children, though her sacrifice hasn’t yielded many readers. Rachman’s narrative, in turn, comprises Dora’s stories. One, titled “The novelist’s estranged daughter,” takes the point of view of Dora’s daughter, Beka, a California comedy writer going stir crazy during the Covid-19 lockdown. Some are captivating, especially “The man who took all the books away,” a harrowing and Kafkaesque tale of a young Syrian man’s imprisonment for possessing a borrowed phone containing a video satirizing the country’s president. Others, though funny, have less heft, such as “A writer from the festival,” which tracks a third-rate novelist’s misadventures as he tries to promote his work (“Come one, come all,” reads his advertisement for a reading; in the end, Dora writes, “All couldn’t make it. Nor could one”). Rachman remains a master comic stylist, but here the whole is less than its gleaming parts. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, RCW Literary. (June)