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.
Content from our partners
