Perfectionish
2025/11/01
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
In 2016 an Australian newspaper columnist complained that Millennials were spending too much money on Avocado toast and not setting enough aside for their mortgage. A great deal of angry discourse followed, and now, depending on you perspective, Avocado Toast is either shorthand for profligate Millennials or Boomers misunderstanding their economic privilege. An entire generation was aching to be better observed. Fortunately, relief has finally arrived and we have Millennial novelists who are putting their own generation under far more astute scrutiny.
Perfection is one of the finer novels. At the very least, it understands that specificity is more powerful than generalization. Our subjects are Anna and Tom, a pair of young graphic designers living and working in Berlin. And maybe they do eat avocado toast, but that would barely even touch all that defines them. Originally from an unspecified southern European country (read Italy), they never went to college, but made their way professionally making websites, riding the wave of opportunity to German capital. They believed it was in Berlin that they would find what they aspired to: the life they had seen lived on their social media feeds. And they find this life and it works out for them until it doesn’t, and the gap between the perfection glimpsed online and the reality they live widens to a chasm.
There is an almost insufferably snide edge to the novel. It is soaked in a covid lockdown pessimism, even if the novel’s timeline stops short of 2020. Anna and Tom are given a superficial and de-localized politics that is both recognizable and bluntly unfair. The very construction of each sentence disdains them with its habitual “would”: “They would get worked up about silly fights between strangers. They would show a fervent interest in the affairs of people they would never meet.” And so on. Though they are our protagonists, they aren’t dignified with the narrative trappings such characters are usually afforded. Anna and Tom are merely part of a milieu; their behavior is merely typical. Anna and Tom have have let social media shape their their desires: as consumers, creatives, romantic partners, and citizens. They aspire for their life to match the aesthetic they are themselves manufacturing for their own clients’ websites. Their desires are what is called “mimetic” in the language of theory, and if you are Girard all desire is like this. What could be less authentic than being incapable of shaping your own wants and tastes?
But I do not subscribe to the theories of Girard, and I am less cynical about my own generation. I think that Millennials are probably the generation most aware of the issues surrounding social media. And those who read the Guardian are unusually well informed, actually. The self-lacerating tone seems like a joke when you consider the nature grim politics that currently threaten Europe.
(There is a trend among Millennials for starting book clubs, and I am part of it. We read Perfection a few months ago, and as usual I was gifted with the keen insight of my friends. I already knew that Perfection was heavily indebted to George Perec’s “Things: A Story of the Sixties”, but one of my readers went away and read it – in the original French! It turns out Perfection is more than a little indebted to Perec, and hews very closely to his plot, tone, characterization, and pacing. My friend was left more than a little unsettled reading one after the other. Here is a voice of the Millennial generation, and they are just repackaging the literature of the sixties for us. Which is its own indictment, I suppose.)
But for all that, the novel remains undeniably brilliant. It couldn’t have been any other city than Berlin, not even New York. The depiction of Berlin, its expat community and creative class, and how it has changed over the last decade and a half is rendered wonderfully in all its dispiriting detail. Reading about Latronico, it is clear he was skewering himself as much as anyone else. He lived in Berlin for 13 years, and began to be suspicious of the life he had curated for himself resembling the lives of everyone he found on Instagram. The biggest issue the novel has might be how well it will survives the future. I suspect that astute observations about Millennials may begin to feel a little quaint once we have really come to terms with Zoomers. Avocado toast has nothing on the Gen Z stare.
Absolutely, Batman
2025/10/18
Absolute Batman: Vol1 The Zoo (Writer: Scott Snyder, Artist: Nick Dragotta)
Almost all comic book artists operate a side hustle doing spec commissions from fans, and those commissions are overwhelmingly for pictures of Batman. So tiresome and predictable are these requests, that I have heard that artists will often give discounts for anyone requesting anything novel that the artist might enjoy drawing. But comic book artists have to hustle, and so they continue to churn out those Batman commissions.
One person who never had to hustle was Bruce Wayne, the boy orphaned into incredible wealth and a deep personality complex that has captured our imagination. Or at least that is the character as is traditional told. DC comics’ Absolute series latest attempt to reboot and reimagine their traditional stable of superheroes, with a generous, but maybe not too generous, license to reinterpret. Absolute Batman is the flagship title, and from what I sense of the buzz, the response has been positive.
Absolute Batman has hustle. Maybe grindset, but I’d say something more than grindset. His father was a public school teacher, gunned down on a school field trip – the class including his own son – to the zoo. Bruce and the rest of his class took shelter in the bat house. So it all begins. All the pieces rearranged, inverted, and reconstructed. I enjoyed the notion that the World’s Greatest Detective developed his intellect by taking a thorough liberal arts education. It was actually kind of touching to see Bruce Wayne grow his power base by going into government and getting involved in public works. Bruce Wayne doesn’t have a the grindset. You don’t become Batman by having the grindset. Bruce Wayne became Batman by being a striver.
But some of the rearrangements seemed less inspired. Alfred Pennyworth is now a cynical special forces agent, roaming Gotham city on the orders of unknown parties. It is beyond a cliche to reinvent a character by giving them a special forces background – it’s more like a joke. It is a joke because everyone is a badass now. Batman was already the ultimate badass, but not an absolute badass it seems. There is an amped up brutality to his fighting. There is a lot more impaling, stabbing, and dismembering. His bat symbol, one of many homages to Frank Millar’s Dark Knight, is now an axe head, ready to be wielded against Batman’s foes.
The most telling reinvention, maybe the best and the worst, is what has happened to Batman physically. This is Batman who did not miss leg day. Someone realized that Batman’s bodybuilder biceps were ridiculous and fixed it by jacking out his thighs and calves. Superhero comics have always exploited the teenage preoccupation with the adult physique - most obviously the female physique, but more so the male physique. This Batman’s physique is not there to impress women, it is to intrigue men. It is as if the artist has observed the growing body dysmorphia among young men fueled by steroid abusing superhero actors and fitness influencers, and just pushed it all to its logical conclusion.
Who are Batman’s foes? A faceless gang “The Party Animals” causing sociopathic violence across Gotham. They are a rotten bunch, and that is about all there is too them. They are literally faceless baddies, committing their terrible deeds while wearing an assortment of masks. The more familiar rogues gallery of characters have become Wayne’s poker buddies from school, awaiting their own personal developments, or lurking almost out of sight, for future story arcs. This in part seems to be by design. If there was a goal in this first arc, it was surely to make the Absolute Batman more interesting than his villains.
For all that I would note that this comic is eminently readable. There is some truly execrable visual story telling in the superhero comics world. There are convoluted continuities and artists working desperately around their own limitations. But shorn of its baggage, this batman comic moves along at a brisk pace, ready to surprise you every couple of pages with some novel take on the familiar material.
For now at least, comic books artists have a new and interesting way to draw Batman for the fans.
Taken for a Ride
2025/10/09
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
When critics talk about a writer’s “late style”, I have come to understand it as a euphemism for a writer losing their grip in the fundamental demands of the craft. Where once they had themes that would elevate a plot they now engage in philosophical crankery that leaves their stories obscure and inscrutable. The Passenger is fine example of this. It can be fairly described as ambitious without having to admit it doesn’t function narratively. Its prose can be praised without having to examine why it compares so poorly against the author’s earlier work. It is mystifying enough in its intent that few will dare call it an outright failure.
Robert Western is many things as a protagonist. He is a Renaissance man who mourns his deceased sister, dead now for over a decade. He once dug up a small fortune in gold from his grandmother’s basement and blew it all racing cars in Europe. He was a math and physics prodigy, but is unable to deal with the guilt of his father’s involvement in the Manhattan project. He now works as a salvage diver and frequents the dive bars of New Orleans. His desire for his dead sister was incestuous, but honestly I have no idea what that fact has to do with anything else in the book. And for all that he fails to captivate.
There is a plot. One night Western is called out to a dive on a plane crashed underwater. Nothing about the crash seems right. The plane is intact, the bodies have been underwater for days already, the pilot’s bag is missing, along with a navigation panel. Something sinister is afoot. Mysterious agents are in pursuit. It is possible that Western has seen too much.
This precis might suggest that there is momentum to the narrative, so I should clarify that there is not. As Western feels mysterious forces breathing down his neck, he goes about his day with a startling lack of urgency. The story unfolds as a sequence of encounters between Western and various characters, always referred to by a work nickname: Red, Oiler, Shaddam, Borman, Dogdick, Grenellan, Royal. These characters often arrive unannounced and with no relation to what I just described as the plot. One passage sees Western sit down with Asher and have an extended conversation about the history of quantum mechanics. You could remove the scene and it would not damage the shape of the novel at all. It is Asher’s only appearance. Shaddam bemoans the depravity of the culture with all the verge of a Substacker with at most two overlong posts in them. Borman is a drunk hiding out in the swamp, going to seed, and suggests that while Western isn’t a piece of shit, or a prick, or an asshole, he is probably some kind of fuck. Not a dumb fuck. Probably a sick fuck. Dogdick doesn’t actually appear. “Tell Dogdick I’m still alive and still crazy”, Borman says to Western.
I was happy enough reading most of these encounters. At some point it becomes clear that the initial suggestion of a plot was just a faint. This is not No Country For Old Men again, this is the book of Job. Bobby goes from one converstaion to another, wrestling with all the many and various ways we might conclude that “life’s a bitch”. Much more tiresome are the dream sequences (or rather the hallucinations), from the past, from the dead sister, where she is trapped in nonsense dialogues with a deformed character referred to as the Kid. They are a case study in all the reasons why dream sequences are bad. They are long, they are recurrent, they barely relate to the plot, and they are utterly infuriating to read. They are distinguished from the rest of the text by being set in italic text, so you can quickly skim ahead and feel your spirits sink at their approach.
At some point late in the book we are granted an extended explanation of why there must have been a second shooter with a high powered hunting rifle to blow the back of JFK’s skull out. I think I have some idea of how it relates to the ideas the book is playing with. But I mostly thought it was a really embarrassing case of what the critics call a writer’s “late style”.