“This seems to be the book all the cool, smart people are reading this summer,” the friendly cashier remarked as I paid for my copy of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2022) at the McNally Jackson in downtown Brooklyn. The compliment, I confess, had a somewhat discouraging effect on me.
Latronico’s lean novel follows Anna and Tom, a pair of multihyphenate digital creatives living in Berlin in the 2010s. Published in translation this year by NYRB and short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Perfection opens with a meticulous description of pictures of the couple’s apartment, which features a tattered art nouveau façade plus “honey-colored floorboards,” Scandinavian furniture, and “low-maintenance, luxuriant plants” within. Beneath the photogenic luster of Anna and Tom’s life—beyond the frames composed and cropped for display on a short-term rental platform—stir inner vicissitudes of loneliness and frustration.
A novel about the ennui of curated living bound for the meticulously curated bookshelves of the same cosmopolitan professionals it scrutinizes, Perfection offers no escape from the perfectly reflexive trap it lays for its readers.
Structurally, Perfection is an adaptive reuse of Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, deliberately constructed with similar characters, turns of events, and ethnographic detachment. Like Things, Perfection leans almost entirely on descriptions of designed spaces and objects, limning a lifestyle by extension. There is no dialogue in the novel; we never learn what Anna and Tom look like or which “large but peripheral Southern European city” they hail from. They are contoured by the aesthetic environments around them, accruements of the design shibboleths that seem to follow them everywhere they go—Helvetica Neue, brushed concrete flooring, back issues of Monocle, “monsteras shaped like clouds,” and so on.
It’s a sort of déformation professionnelle for so-called creatives to pine after originality, hanging one’s self-conception on an entangled complex of professional distinction and fetishized consumption. Of this, Anna and Tom, myself, and I would guess Latronico are all victims. The protagonists “had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.” Alas, “the visual points of difference they sold to their clients were also sold to thousands of others by creative professionals all over the western world,” such that “an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation.” Indeed, this sameness was what made me wince at the checkout counter at McNally Jackson. (Another confession: It was after my Instagram algorithm fed me a New Yorker reel recommending Perfection that I went in search of a copy.)
“A much-needed rat’s-eye view of the built environment.”
Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, Latronico’s prose strips the deluginous images on our screens of their sticky allure, making them appear brittle and dry—an austere triumph of the written word. The novel’s point strikes me as essentially Kierkegaardian: The aesthete is perpetually searching for new stimulants to keep life interesting, but without deeper commitments, any satisfaction attained is only fleeting. Latronico never lets his satire curdle into smugness, nor does he deny the pleasures that Anna and Tom’s work, possessions, and habits do bring them. The point is merely that no quantity of orange wine or open shelving will make us cool and special and fulfilled, as social media would have us dream.
In the end, 125 pages of Adobe Creative Suite, social media activism, and farm-to-table dinner parties culminate in the bathetic labors of running an agriturismo on an inherited Mediterranean property. Anna and Tom have changed careers and countries, but they remain mired in the work of “taming reality to make it fit the images they had sold.” A novel about the ennui of curated living bound for the meticulously curated bookshelves of the same cosmopolitan professionals it scrutinizes, Perfection offers no escape from the perfectly reflexive trap it lays for its readers. To mangle two design shibboleths at once: Form follows dysfunction, and the tedium is the message.