From the very outset of Vincenzo Latronico’s fourth novel (and the first to be translated to English), Perfection, there is a simmering contempt that’s always waiting to boil to the surface, but never does in quite the direct way one might have ordinarily expected before emotional suppression and passive aggression became de rigeur. A description that can, in effect, describe what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century.
This feeling of contempt always waiting and wanting to boil over perhaps really started to percolate more heavily post-9/11. That is, for the American millennial. But, as an Italian, Latronico’s lens homes in on the European one. Only to reveal that it isn’t that much different. And this is precisely because of the “same-ification” (read that as “Americanization” if you prefer) of everything and everywhere, also a direct result of the internet. There are also still those same motifs of “hipsterdom” and gentrification, hypocrisy and emotional impotence that are endemic to a certain era of what it meant to be a millennial in both the U.S. and Western Europe.
But while Latronico might be deft in the art of depicting millennial ennui and the general “stuckness” of said generation, the problem of “modern” dissatisfaction is not a new one. In fact, Latronico has essentially rewritten Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, and is sure to credit that work by quoting it before his version begins, choosing to highlight the line, “That was where real life was, the life they wanted to know, that they wanted to lead.” But between the “reality” and the wanting to know an “ideal” life lies the dissatisfaction. One that Latronico had been trying to crystallize in writing for several years before the pandemic arrived and gave him the chance to perform the “keeping busy” task of “updating” Perec’s work through the filter of millennial malaise.
As Latronico told The Guardian (itself name-checked in the book with, “Their intellectual horizon was therefore largely formed from headlines in The Guardian or The New York Times”), “I’d been struggling for years to capture the way our inner life is shaped by the flow of images we see online. My sexuality is defined by images I’ve seen of how people have sex; my apartment is defined by images of other people’s apartments… I read Things and immediately saw parallels. Perec was trying to describe the life of someone whose identity is defined by their relationship to objects. He flipped the hierarchy of a traditional novel by putting his characters in the background; the detail of their surroundings becomes the main stage…”
So it is that Perfection begins with an extremely detailed description of the apartment in Berlin where a couple named Tom and Anna reside (their names being deliberately generic, and ones that never offer a last name to go with them, in keeping with that vagueness, that sense of them being a “cutout mold” of an average pair of “young creative professionals” living in a major city). And it’s an apartment meticulously decorated to give off that “effortlessly careless” yet simultaneously austere/designed-for-a-Pinterest-board look. This, of course, includes many plants—oh so many plants (after all, Latronico, like Orwell with Keep the Aspidistra Flying, seems to know the symbolic value of them). Such as the “lush monstera stretching its shiny leaves toward the outside world, a fiddle-leaf fig almost touching the ceiling from its faux concrete pot, trailing ivies and hanging peperomia on display across two wall shelves, and string-of-pearls and Chinese money plants whose tangled foliage reaches all the way to the floor.”
As if, by peppering their apartment with this ultra-manicured and controlled form of nature, Tom and Anna can ignore just how unnatural their existence is. What with most of their days spent indoors, essentially “locked up” inside their self-made prison, where they take on various graphic and web design jobs (extending into the field of “marketing” as well) in their roles as freelancers. The word “free” in that job title being somewhat ironic since, despite how this form of money-making is constantly sold as a way to be free by “making your own schedule,” more often than not, it means being chained to a computer inside so that one can fulfill the tasks they’ve taken on, in addition to perennially chasing down new ones in order to keep the flow of income semi-consistent.
In spite of this, by the end of the first elaborately delineated section (called “Present”), Latronico writes, “It is a happy life.” With the caveat that immediately follows: “or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.”
And thus, in one fell swoop of breaking down just how little of that one hundred and eighteen euros will go directly to Tom and Anna—what with everyone wanting their “cut” in this late-stage capitalism life—Latronico stealthily debunks the myth of “perfection” or a “happy” and “easy” life just because it might appear to be on the readily-poked-through surface. Not only that, but it takes quite a bit of effort to secure what is still often referred to as “easy money” or, more modernly, “passive income.”
The brief but weighty “Present” section gives way to “Imperfect,” with Latronico unwaveringly reminding the reader in ways both subtle and direct that, “Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures.” For, try as a millennial might to “craft” the perfect image for social media consumption, the behind-the-scenes situation can rarely measure up. Hence, that increasing feeling of “disconnect” by being constantly connected…to the internet. A kind of dysphoria resulting from the unshakeable realization that “presentation” and “curation” can never measure up to “the way it actually is.”
Nonetheless, Tom and Anna are game to keep trying. Especially at first. This is why every last detail is so carefully curated—again, all in a bid to seem “effortless.” Take, for example, “…an LP collection with a few prized pieces facing outwards (a limited edition In Rainbows, a first edition Kraftwerk).” These particular musical choices alluding very much to the “hipster scum” of the era Latronico is referring to in this book. That is to say, sometime in the 2010s. To be sure, the further away time has gotten from that decade, the more it appears that millennial nostalgia for it has begun to crop up (see also: Chandler Levack’s upcoming film, Mile End Kicks). For it represents a period when everything still felt fresh and promising. And sure, being “youthful”/“coming of age” is a part of why millennials have started to yearn for that supposedly “simpler” decade (even though it’s the same decade that yielded a certain Orange Creature becoming president of the U.S.). But it’s more than that. It’s the fact that, during this era, the latest iteration of how the internet was taking shape still felt both innocent (back in those germinal days of Instagram, and when TikTok didn’t even exist yet) and useful (case in point, for Tom and Anna’s Airbnb money-making a.k.a. “passive income” endeavors). As full of promise as the future seemed to be at that moment.
It’s only looking back from the new present that one can see how insidious it was all becoming. As well as being a direct catalyst for the forms of gentrification that Latronico quietly rails against throughout Perfection. Even though, yes, he is keenly aware that only people who cause gentrification tend to use that term. As if, by being “self-aware” about it, there’s some sort of “get out of judgment and criticism free” card to be had.
The same derision materializes when Latronico speaks on the kind of “social media activism” that Tom and Anna become involved with after a refugee crisis gives them the opportunity to “help.” Only to find that the extent of what they can offer is, as usual, posting a picture and hashtagging it with the “appropriate” phrases that might make it more “discoverable,” therefore put a bigger spotlight on “the issue at hand.” All ultimately in service of the person posting, who can feel good about their “involvement” (passive as it is through the medium of social media) because of how many “likes” or “hearts” that image is getting. And, of course, this is also what separates the millennial generation from its forebears: the latter had to engage with their activism tangibly. Often at great physical and emotional risk.
To this point, what is often said about millennials (apart from them not being able to afford home ownership—hence, Perfection’s final act nod to “The Great Wealth Transfer” being the lone way for a millennial to gain property) is that they’re the only generation who grew up between the time of “no internet” and the total pervasiveness of it. The only generation whose youth was caught somewhere in between past and present. For even Gen X got to live out their adolescence without fear of it being documented in some destined-to-come-back-and-haunt-you way thanks to everything living forever on the internet. Because the closest Gen X had to such a thing was the ability to document with a video camera and some VHS tapes (see: Soleil Moon Frye’s Kid 90). Though, thanks to the wonders of digitization, even those moments can be unwantedly disseminated onto the internet.
However, prior to the internet becoming such a scary place, it was a realm designed to carve out an identity, to share resources and information. This is the version of the internet that Tom and Anna grew up with, and the reason they ended up “falling into” their careers. Even if any job that allowed for “working from home” in the 2010s was often still met with upturned noses, suspicion and the general outlook that it couldn’t possibly be called a “career.”
As Latronico recounts of Tom and Anna’s freelance trajectory, “[Their current work] had formed out of their passions, more or less at the same time the internet—their teenage obsession—had crystallized into an industry designed to subsume all others. 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 that reflected their tastes and interests, lists of things that made them special. This passion of theirs wasn’t learned. It was a natural consequence of the context in which they had grown up.”
And during this period of their youth, “The web was chaotic and surprising, its elusive resources the stuff of legend.” An unbelievable source of “magic” where everything from Pam Anderson having sex with Tommy Lee to Beanie Babies could be found. Latronico then drives home the point of how millennials and the internet became so entwined because, “The internet came of age with them. Like their own entrance into adulthood, it didn’t happen overnight, but gradually [or, as Hemingway would say, ‘Gradually, then suddenly’], in a way that only seemed inevitable after the fact.” And “after the fact,” it was as if “they lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.”
Among those images—ones that give a particular “time stamp” to when this narrative is meant to be taking place—are “a girl riding a wrecking ball” (Miley Cyrus in 2013) and “a famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wine glass balanced on her tailbone” (Kim Kardashian in 2014). That latter image being for a Paper magazine cover with the headline: “Break the Internet.” At the time, it was the beginning of using that phrase to mean garnering so many likes, follows and general “engagement” that the internet might ostensibly “break” a.k.a. crash. But now, it’s a phrase that feels like it ought to pertain more to the notion of disconnecting from it entirely so as to figure out what it might mean to be human again. At the same time, there’s a reason it is said that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The internet is the same. And though it seems like many are on the current bandwagon of “logging off,” to live without it now would come at other considerable costs, especially since most of the way society and infrastructure functions at present is entirely reliant upon it. Something that, of course, has opened humanity up to a very precarious and vulnerable situation, should a Leave the World Behind-type scenario occur.
Besides, Anna and Tom still exist in an epoch of the internet where its sinister effects weren’t fully understood to them. The way that everyone in their “feed” only showed what was best or most beautiful (i.e., most filtered) about their lives wasn’t yet perceived as a way to make those on the outside looking in feel depressed when comparing their own lives to what was shown. Or rather, presented. Always leaving out any unpleasantness. What’s more, “The images followed no logical thread beyond their own splendor: vintage clothes and filtered selfies, apartments, book covers, cupcakes, flowers, wild animals, galaxies, contemporary art shows, feet.” Even so, “Anna and Tom would be captivated. Their interest in plants—a hobby that had never occurred to them when they were students—was likely a result of the never-ending stream of pictures they were fed of stunning plants in bay windows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.”
That this surfeit of plants as a primary aspect of millennial interior design (a style too often called “millennial minimalism”) becomes such a focal point in Perfection is yet another indication of something “tragic” about “the millennial experience.” Firstly, that most of it is rooted (no plant pun intended) indoors and, secondly, that the closest the generation has gotten to “taking care of something” outside of themselves and their own individualistic needs is an easy-to-maintain plant. Besides that, “The bright green tropical leaves and the purplish-white dots on the begonias would parade across photo grids as evidence of a rarefied, curated life… Plants appeared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill.” And, through all this posting and scrolling, “Time disappeared.”
For that’s what the internet does: allows hours spent on it to feel like mere minutes as one gets sucked further and further in. And so disappear it does, until Latronico finds his intentionally flaccid protagonists at the end of the 2010s, having tried to stave off their increasing dissatisfaction with and in Berlin by migrating briefly to Lisbon (“the new Berlin”) for another freelance opportunity, and then on to Sicily in search of something else. Something “more.” That vague, unfulfillable word that will always lead to unhappiness because it is synonymous with finding something “better.” Which is why Latronico also commented in his interview with The Guardian, “Once you start saying: ‘This aspect of my life could be optimized’ [that oh so internet-y word—as in ‘search engine optimization’], it immediately isn’t enough, because anything can be ‘better’ by some definition… Once something enters the domain of optimization, there’s no turning back.” And for millennials, there hasn’t been any turning back since the late 90s and early 00s, when the internet first started really infecting their lives, offering to “optimize” it and, ultimately, doing the opposite.
In many regards, the millennial knowledge of what life was like before the internet took hold—thus, before it became omnipresent from the very beginning of one’s childhood—is like salt in the wound of nostalgia. Whereas the current crop of “subsequent generations,” Z, Alpha and Beta, can never know any different. Will never find it truly “odd” or “terrifying” that their time and mind has been enslaved and upended in this decidedly twenty-first century manner. With their own bids for “perfection” mutating into even more horrifying means to achieve it in real life, as opposed to just online (for instance, an unending quest for the kind of facial plastic surgery that will re-create the look of a social media filter).