I wanted to shake Rachman and say: Don't you know anyone nice?

Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists" remains fun to read 2/3 through it but I have to say: has there ever been such a collection of bitches, bastards, doormats, and losers as you'll find in this story? Newspapers are well known as a refuge and sanctuary for eccentrics of every stripe, and comic fiction has free rein to exaggerate of course, but at some point along the way I wanted to shake Rachman (or one of his characters) and say, hey, don't you know anyone who's nice, competent, committed? Don't you know any young reporters with any spine? Don't you know anyone involved in a serious relationship, anyone committed to a partner? Okay, this is a satire, and it's fun, and, among all the many newspaper send-ups Rachman gains a little more forbearance because he set The Imerfectionists in an English-language international newspaper, so the types are perhaps more extreme than at the domestic variety. He's definitely in the same territory as the one Arthur Phillips explored in Prague (and Phillips blurbs this book, unsurprisingly) - the young, the drifters, the troubled, the lonely - but in Prague the were not uniform in their fecklessness. The story/chapter I finished last night in The Imperfectionists involves a would-be Cairo stringer who allows a wizened foreign correspondent to take over his apartment, steal his laptop, steal his story, send him off on pointless research, sponge his last dollars, the hapless dude even sleeps in an armchair while the older guy sleeps on his bed - he can't see through this schemer and louse? Come on, wake up! Rachman's stories/chapters (they're really both - it's a novel in vignettes) are uniformly funny and sharp but the cumulative effect is disheartening. Newspapers are like this - in parts, at times - but he misses the big picture, which is totally different.