Great fun to read The Imperfectionists, but will it all add up?

The losers, dreamers, schemers, and eccentrics who seem to collect around a newsroom have been a comic staple of fiction for some time - I've tried my hand at this myself - and Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists" rushes in where many have already tread (trod?), and, amazingly, he finds lots of new material in this well-gleaned field. The Imperfectionists - first hundred pages or so - is very smart, funny, lots of fun, and seemingly very well designed to boot. I'm generally not really drawn to "linked stories," which strike me as warmed over mfa theses, but this collection is much more than linked stories. Each seems to be the story of someone working at a Rome-based international English-language newspaper (obviously modeled on the IHT), with short bridge chapters that capsulize the history of the newspaper. It's really a novel told from one single point of view - Rachman's - but with multiple lenses - a modern Canterbury Tales Prologue, in a way. Each of the first five or so chapters has been very entertaining and, to anyone who's worked in a newsroom, exaggerated but largely credible. We all know the ambitious editor with her own personal news obsessions, the tyrant of the copy desk with his style "bible," the drudge relegated to obits, the washed-out stringer with his tales of the old days, the needy and neurotic not-so-young reporter so unlucky in love, and so on. The obit-writer chapter btw is a clever tribute to Naipaul, a reversal of his life, in this case a failed newspaperman who's father was a famous novelist. We'll see how, or if, all of these sketches add up, but even if they don't it's great fun to read each one - each one funny, mordant, and terribly sad.