Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes (New York Review Books, March 18, 2025)

Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is the story of Anna and Tom, a young couple from “southern Europe” who live an aesthetically curated life as ex-pats in Berlin in the early 2010s.

While it’s very specifically a “Berlin” novel, charting the evolution (and dissolution) of a particular scene which Latronico (who resides there) no doubt observed, it’s also more broadly a “millennial” novel, exploring the image-conscious habits and folkways of those of us born in the early 1980s—a generation that came to maturity in the thick of the 21st century and, as adults, sought to create a kind of open-minded, consciously cosmopolitan, creatively fulfilling (yet ultimately consumer-oriented) lifestyle for ourselves, one that would allow us to deviate from the rote, narrowly constructed paths traveled by our normie parents. Or so we thought.

Latronico opens the book with an exhaustive description of Anna and Tom’s apartment that, while played completely straight, still manages to come off as withering.

A low sofa and Danish curved mahogany armchair upholstered in petrol-blue textured cotton; a herringbone tweed blanket; an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament hanging from a midnight-blue fabric cable; a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit.

This isn’t a new tactic—Latronico has explicitly based his book on George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), and the trope of listing consumer goods as a way to indicate moral depravity or the empty consumerism of modern life is a hallmark of 1990s film and fiction, from American Psycho to Fight Club—formative millennial media. The reappearance of this trope is probably a good bellwether for the global economy; it only really makes sense as a critique when people are flush enough to actually have a lot of stuff.

Nevertheless, he paints an alluring portrait of the contemporary bohemian bourgeois experience:

The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated. It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker.

Sounds nice. But what if… it’s all an illusion?

“Reality,” writes Latronico, “didn’t always live up to the pictures.”

Peer-to-Peer

Latronico (b. 1984) has produced an extraordinary literary examination of this millennial milieu, and the strikingly precise descriptions of the generation’s quirks and foibles were both remarkably familiar and deeply troubling to this reviewer (b. 1983). The last thing an elder millennial wants is to be reduced to a type, to discover that their quest for authenticity, uniqueness, and novelty has ultimately led them to the same place as everybody else.

Perfection does just that, with ruthless efficiency. It reflects us back to ourselves, but it doesn’t let us choose the angle, apply a filter, or pick the best shot from the burst. It’s the novel equivalent of when someone shares an unflattering photo of you on Facebook or Instagram without checking with you first. Hey man, not cool.

Anna and Tom are “digital natives” who, thanks to the coincidence of growing up in tandem with modern computing and the internet, developed not just a career, but an identity, around being online. As a result, they have found themselves captured by the very platforms and algorithms they helped bring to prominence.

As characters, they don’t have much depth. Or much character. Whether Latronico has crafted them like this deliberately, so we can project more of ourselves onto them, or whether he is indicating that the “type” of person they represent is generally lacking in interiority is hard to discern.

They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.

We never really engage with them directly; instead, Latronico’s narrator presents Anna and Tom to us as if they are the subjects of an anthropological study, providing in-depth, dispassionate descriptions of their actions, speculating on their motivations, and occasionally tossing in a few barbed judgements that make clear where he stands.

Losing my edge

Anna and Tom are the affluent millennial everyman and woman, leading a superficially appealing life that is materially rich, yet ultimately vacuous. How do we know it’s vacuous? That narrator tells us it is. “They had glimpsed—within themselves and those around them—a flakiness and vanity that they could not now unsee,” writes Latronico. “They were restless.”

This restlessness is the driving conflict of the book. Unfulfilled by their outwardly glossy lifestyle, they embark on an effort to find what eludes them—true purpose.1 Their attempts, while well-meaning, tend to be somewhat unrealistic and overambitious. They are continually thwarted, by circumstance, by reality, or by their own inability to follow through.

What’s interesting about their restlessness is that, though Anna and Tom seem unable to precisely pinpoint its origin, it is clearly the result of them aging out of their scene. Latronico does a good job of describing the hip Neukölln demimonde in which Anna and Tom play—exotic restaurants, freewheeling sex clubs, and chic art galleries, the kind of places that offer not just entertainment and diversion but a degree of status and cultural cache. A sense of self-satisfaction.

But when the frisson of these things begins to fade and their gritty, bohemian neighborhood is invaded by a legion of more basic, mainstream newcomers who work in finance and represent the second, more fatal wave of gentrification, Anna and Tom are unmoored. They set off on a trip across Europe trying to recapture the feeling they’ve lost.

But they’ll never find it. Because that feeling doesn’t come from a place or a scene—it comes from being in your twenties. Anna and Tom are simply moving into the next phase of their lives. They are getting old, but don’t want to admit it. To no longer be in the “target demographic” of youthful, trendsetting consumers is a form of social death. At the risk of sounding like a conservative, what Anna and Tom probably actually needed to do was think about having kids. But that would mean giving up on their aesthetic bohemianism and after that they’d just be bourgeois, which would be a form of ego death for them. So instead they live in a kind of limbo, looking for some way to stave off the inevitable future.

Latronico assumes that you likely know people like Anna and Tom probably resent them a little and would appreciate knowing that, deep down, they are unhappy and unfulfilled despite their seemingly perfect lives. At times, he lays it on a little thick. Traits most would consider modern virtues are twisted around on them and thrown back in their faces. Their openness to new experiences is reduced to trite cultural tourism; their sexual adventurousness is a source of comedy—we’re assured that their sex is pretty disappointing and that deep down they are too embarrassed to admit their preferences are strictly vanilla; their inclination to help the less fortunate merely reveals them to be utterly lacking in the skills necessary to address the real problems of the world. Refugees aren’t in the necessary frame of mind to appreciate precise kerning. In short, Anna and Tom can’t catch a break.

Now, if you’re someone inclined to pick up new fiction in translation published by New York Review Books, it’s probably pretty likely that you actually are Anna and Tom. And you probably feel a little guilty about that, a little conflicted—just as they do. Perfection gives you an opportunity to do a little penance for your hipster-bougie habits and show that you can take a joke, even when it’s at your own expense. I would post the Homer Simpson “It’s true, it’s true, we are so lame” GIF, but I fear that would only further indict me as a terminal millennial.

For sure, when I read this passage, I knew I had been clocked with extreme prejudice:

They had got into music just as online piracy was prompting the rise of peer-to-peer networks. At the end of the school day, their long afternoons would be spent jumping between History and Maths homework and Photoshop and Flash, feeling their way blindly through bugs and mistakes as they tried to improve their GeoCities sites. They would spend hours building personal websites and profiles that reflected their tastes and interests, lists of things that made them special.

“It me,” as they say online. However, the limited edition vinyl of In Rainbows Anna and Tom are so proud of marks them as latecomers. I say this as someone who got OK Computer for Christmas in 1997, who had the bootleg, unmastered MP3s of Hail to the Thief well before the album came out. I saw the Kid A/Amnesiac tour at Suffolk Downs. Get on my level, Anna and Tom.

Choose your own adventure

There are two ways to read this novel.

The first is, I believe, its intended reading, which seems to be how it’s been received so far given some of the early commentary—as a tragedy. Anna and Tom, finally recognizing that their curated lives are devoid of real meaning, endeavor to break free from the spell that the spectacle has cast on them in order find real purpose. But they lack the capabilities to do so. No, they have been robbed of them.

“Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world,” writes Latronico, “but they couldn’t even imagine it.”

Modern society, late capitalism, and relentless consumerism have left them unable to discern true meaning, and in the end they have no option but to capitulate. They give in to the spectacle. Not only that, they commit to perpetuating it and ensnaring others with its meretricious charm. I think of Orwell: It was alright. Everything was alright. The struggle was finished. They had won the victory over themselves.

The other reading is—maybe everything actually was alright? “They worried they were content merely being contented,” writes Latronico. And one has to ask, is being contented so bad? This angst, this feeling that a simple, comfortable life isn’t enough, or that on some level it is, in fact, an affront—perhaps that is their real problem. It’s no virtue to be unable to appreciate what one has or to shun contentment out of some sense that it is undeserved or uncool. It’s just the same shallow concern about external appearances, but in another form.

In this reading of the story, Anna and Tom’s ability to put all that angst aside and make peace with their talents as conjurers of the spectacle isn’t a tragedy at all, but a triumph. They’ve realized that their guilt-ridden pursuit of some deeper, more meaningful purpose is futile. There is no greater meaning. Contentment can be an end unto itself. In this reading, one must imagine Anna and Tom happy.

I like this lenticular quality the novel has, its ability to shift in meaning depending on your perspective, your attitude. I suspect that, when I was a little younger, I would’ve found the wry indictment of the first reading satisfying. It would’ve made me feel better about myself to be able to look at Anna and Tom and smirk about how deluded they are. But with a few more years and a little more life experience under my belt, I can’t help but find myself thinking the latter reading has a lot more to offer.

Maybe you think I’m fooling myself. That’s fine. In the end, the lesson of Perfection is that no matter what path you choose, the most important thing is to not spend so much time worrying about how things look to other people.

Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. His criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Millions, among others. His short fiction about aspiring ghosts, trivial psychics, and petty saboteurs has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, BULL, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ink In Thirds, and Uncharted. He is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.

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