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.