Millennials are a joke now, just not a very funny one. Their quirks and quiddities can be finely itemised, from their tastes in furniture to their favourite drugs. They can be chronologised, their rise and fall from new and interesting to stale and predictable roughly bracketed within the unresounding period of “the 2010s”. And, at a deeper level, we can begin to take the measure of their generational hamartia, the collective failing that clogged their promise – and which turned them into a punchline.
These are the rough conclusions an attentive reader would take away from Perfection, a new novel by the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico. Though to even call this book a novel is to both overestimate and diminish it: it’s more like an experimental long-read, or a hyper-intellectual piece of lifestyle journalism. Latronico’s fourth book, and his first to be translated into English (by Sophie Hughes), Perfection is substantially inspired by Georges Perec’s 1965 work Things: A Story of the Sixties, an early attempt to novelise the materialist compromises of the post-war generation. A French intellectual, Perec dispensed with bourgeois narratological conventions (dialogue, plot, character) in service of his essayistic conclusions. Latronico follows in his footsteps – indeed, wearing the same tapered, confining stylistic boots. The result is a book that is precise, tight, trite, and heartless.
Anna and Tom are Latronico’s mononymous, monotonous protagonists. But he is far more comfortable in the third-person plural than he is with specific people, and it is page 19 before they are introduced. Even when dealing with the couple, Latronico falls back on “they” as much as possible, all the better to encompass a sense of generational abstraction. Anna and Tom are an expat couple, hailing from some (inevitably un-named) southern European country, and now set up in Berlin. They’re living the life – that’s the life, remote working as web designers in their stylish yet still affordable apartment, piled high with all the millennial bric-a-brac they can muster.
There’s the vinyl record player and the elegant, Anglepoised workstation. There’s a thicket of house plants (not since Orwell’s aspidistra has cloying greenery served as such an effective symbol of social conformity). And there’s dozens of interior statements: “a low sofa and Danish curved mahogany armchair”; “a sandy-coloured Berber rug with a fine geometric pattern”. These objects are arguably Latronico’s true subjects – the novel opens with a cold, exacting, five-page description of this generational clutter from the perspective of Anna and Tom looking at the online advert for their apartment before they move in.
Through Anna and Tom, Latronico has his representative millennial couple – digital natives turned digital workers, whose “first instinct was to press Command-Z” when they “spilled some coffee”. And in Berlin, he has his millennial capital: city of the contemporary art galleries, the reclaimed, rent-controlled industrial blocks and the underground, stimulant-driven nightlife which has served as the inspiration for all other pockets of millennial urban life (Brooklyn, Dalston) worldwide. Anna and Tom adore it, at first: the welcoming, international yet Anglophone community; the delights of the city, opened up by their flexible working patterns; their liberation from the traditional expectations of family and age that condemn the friends they left back home.
But there is a vacancy at the heart of their life together, that spectral ache we know, in imperfect sociological terms, as anomie, apathy, anhedonia. The apartment gets messy, particularly when they sub-let to help afford their own short holidays. Their relationship is listless: “They never doubted they would grow old together. The sex was infrequent and bad,” Latronico writes, with unforgiving bathos. But when they dip their toes in Berlin’s sex-club scene, they can’t face any further immersion. They nod their way through an itchy, restless existence, letting the years slide past them, symbolised by the viral images of the age – a “girl riding a wrecking ball”; a “billionaire pour[ing] a bucket of ice on his head”.
Latronico has plenty in common with his protagonists, as a southern European art critic similarly exiled to the German capital. And in its aggregate of specifics, in its documentary evidence, Perfection is unimpeachable. Though Latronico is sometimes tedious in his targets (the Helvetica font comes in for a kicking as a symbol of sans-serif vapidity on three separate occasions), he is unfailingly accurate. But there is a difference between unsifted detail-proliferation and novelistic noticing. One takes a notebook, and the other takes craft. And while Perfection has been called a satire, at no point is any of this cultural detritus jerked into life by real comic energy.
Instead, Latronico’s narration offers up only mouldering ironies, already so commonplace as to have passed from cliché into disuse. On millennial activism: “They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practice meant they were willing to express outrage at…. racism or sexism that took place in New York.” On millennial hypocrisy: “… gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it”. On millennial politics: “Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world, but they couldn’t even imagine it.”
There is some attempt to conjure his still-life into motion. The 2015 refugee crisis bursts in on Anna and Tom and their circle’s self-absorption, prompting a reckoning over their politics, priorities and purpose. But this only leads Anna and Tom to further flight, specifically to Lisbon, and then to Sicily, where they experience the same waves of alienation they’ve come to loathe in Berlin.
Latronico does have a thesis about millennials. Over-exposed to the backlit surface delights of the digital realm – to false perfection – they’ve become particularly vulnerable to untidy misfortunes of three-dimensional life – to true imperfection. In the brief moments of tech-boom abundance cities like Berlin enjoyed in the 2010s, this generational failing reached pathological proportions, the schism between having everything and having nothing brutally exposed.
But even this is not a purely millennial affliction. The proliferation of images in the digital age is unprecedented. But it was Frenchmen of Georges Perec’s generation who first noticed we lived in a society of spectacles and simulacra. And while Latronico catalogues these themes, he fails to truly dramatise them. Instead, he leaves promising and potentially satirical avenues open. More could have been, for instance, of the irony that, as web developers, Anna and Tom are wallpapering the cells of their generation’s online prison.
The pessimism of Latronico’s vision – which in his discussion of his characters’ sex lives reaches unsettling, Houellebecqian proportions – does speak to a new generational mood. Slumped in the despondency that has so far characterised the 2020s, we might even be nostalgic for Berlin’s lost age of deadening abundance enlivened by chemical highs. But: “all writers are lovers of life, even the blackest of them”, as Martin Amis wrote. Millennial writers should take care not to let the soullessness of their world become that of their novels.
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