In his 1965 breakout novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties, the French novelist Georges Perec lampoons his protagonists, a bourgeois Parisian couple named Jerôme and Sylvie, simply by listing the things they own or desire to own. “It would be all in browns, ochers, duns, and yellows: a world of slightly dull colors, in carefully graded shades, calculated with almost too much artistry,” he writes of the couple’s dream apartment, mocking the cookie-cutter good taste that governs their imagination of a good life. Like other writers who witnessed the proliferation of cheap consumer goods after World War II, such as Annie Ernaux, Perec was disturbed by what he saw as a rise in materialism and a stultifying convergence of tastes. Still, a novel like Things, or The Years, Ernaux’s postwar memoir, will frequently send an American reader to Google; the objects, styles, and cultural products toward which their characters flock are different from those that dominate the pages of comparable novels across the Atlantic. The emerging monoculture in which Perec’s young people live is still a distinctly French one.
That’s not the case in the novel Perfection, which Italian author Vincenzo Latronico first conceived of as a twenty-first-century tribute to Things. Latronico’s fourth novel, and the first to be translated into English, Perfection follows a millennial couple named Anna and Tom, digital nomads born in an unspecified southern European country and “based,” in the parlance of creative-class bios, in Berlin. Where overconsumption powers Things, the internet dominates Perfection, encouraging affluent people across borders to present their possessions as expressions of increasingly indistinguishable selfhood. Reworking Things for our chronically online age, Latronico tells a story of cultural homogenization on a global scale, arguing that obsession with the aesthetics of a life well lived unfits people for the hard work of building communities in which they could really live well.
Translated into chilly, deadpan English by Sophie Hughes, Perfection often reads like a play-by-play retelling of Things. Like Perec, Latronico opens with an elegiac description of a home that doesn’t really exist—in this case, Anna and Tom’s spacious Berlin apartment as they present it to potential subletters on Airbnb, a tableau of Danish furniture, cast-iron cookware, and lush houseplants. Both novels treat their protagonists as inseparable units: Perfection doesn’t contain a single line of dialogue that might distinguish Anna from Tom, and the omniscient narrator reveals little about their individual thoughts or desires as they work together, scroll together, rave together, and experience ennui together. Freelance graphic designers where their Parisian predecessors are freelance market researchers, Anna and Tom have disposable income, a sharp eye for the most stylish records and enamel bowls and natural wines, and an abiding bewilderment that those things produce only fleeting happiness. Jerôme and Sylvie dabble in activism during the Algerian Revolution, and Anna and Tom try to help when thousands of Syrian refugees arrive in Berlin in 2015. Both couples find themselves ill-equipped for civic life and end up retreating into the closed world of their possessions—and, for Anna and Tom, the photos of their possessions that they post online.
Though Latronico’s choice of setting might seem a small deviation, Berlin proves an apt vehicle to explore how Perec’s concerns have played out in the twenty-first century. Anna and Tom initially see the famously cosmopolitan city as an enlightened antidote to the “provincial” atmosphere of their home country. But after the novelty of the city’s Brutalist architecture and all-night clubs wears off, they find themselves living in a slightly more sophisticated monoculture born of the internet’s constant connectivity.
The couple’s friends are expats from Poland, Sweden, and Spain. But as digital natives, they read the same American publications, follow the same online controversies, and discuss politics in the same international school–inflected English, which Hughes manages to render as sterile and generic even without direct dialogue. Social media ensures that Anna and Tom develop hobbies in tandem with their circle, discovering “homemade fermentation kits, fire-roasted cauliflower, and umami at exactly the same time.”
The internet even ensures they never patronize restaurants where they’d have to speak German: a branding aesthetic of “teal green and dusty pink; slightly rounded corners; lightweight Swiss fonts with tight kerning” signals that a business caters to the hip international crowd. In turn, Anna and Tom peddle similar designs to clients back home, ensuring that today’s avant-garde will dominate Europe tomorrow. The remarkable placelessness that characterizes their life mirrors their feverish consumption of decontextualized snippets of news on social media, funhouse descriptions of which mark a rare departure from the novel’s otherwise austere and consciously stylish prose: “An egg became more famous than the pope. A highly contagious virus raged through West Africa. A billionaire poured a bucket of ice on his head.”
Anna and Tom are living in and helping to propagate what the design critic Kyle Chayka has dubbed “AirSpace,” writing in The Verge that “as an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another.” (The hallmark props of AirSpace according to Chayka—reclaimed wood, midcentury chairs, patterned rugs, “neutered Scandinavianism”—all crop up in Perfection.) Chayka identifies tech companies like Airbnb, which create identically sophisticated experiences around the globe, as responsible for AirSpace; Latronico similarly attributes the homogenization of his protagonists’ circle to social media, which has taught Anna and Tom since childhood to style their lives for the camera’s eye and rewards users for imitating a centralized concept of good taste.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the author also uses Airbnb to illustrate how this converging of millennial taste, seemingly an aesthetic matter, keeps money moving across borders and between corporations: when Anna and Tom list their apartment on Airbnb, relying on carefully styled photos to get renters, Latronico notes that their fee includes “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,” and so on. Ironically, this global culture prevents Anna and Tom from actually inhabiting their chosen city: not only do they know few Germans, they can’t even remember which of their favorite neighborhoods were part of the former East or West Berlin.
If Anna and Tom live in a material world created by technology, it’s fitting that they’re roused to action by an image shared on social media—the photograph of a drowned Syrian child that became an emblem of the refugee crisis in 2015. Anna, Tom, and the rest of their circle rightly want to welcome the Syrians pouring into Berlin’s temporary camps, but their attempts quickly descend into farce. They compete to stylishly typeset a German-Arabic phrasebook that the refugees find useless, while other friends are asked not to bring devices to the camps “because the many filmmakers and video artists trying to document the camp at Tempelhof had only generated tensions between the refugees and the police.” No one is equipped to serve as a translator, and they can’t help people integrate into a society whose local complexities they have largely ignored. In fact, their relentless focus on packaging their lives in the recognized visual language of Berlin cool has left them unable to implement the progressive values that their aesthetic is supposed to represent.
Readers who live in a city where AirSpace dominates, or who have imbibed some of Anna and Tom’s taste from social media, will close Perfection with a sense of being personally parodied. Yet if Latronico proposes any kind of corrective to the ill effects of our current monoculture, it’s not to throw out our monstera plants, or to chase down a design aesthetic that has yet to become universally cool, or even to buy less stuff. Rather, he seems to suggest that any aesthetic choices, even outfitting an apartment exactly as Instagram dictates, are acceptable as long as we don’t trick ourselves into believing these material signifiers can ever accumulate into a genuine sense of self or purpose.
Anna and Tom, who sometimes look at the Airbnb photos of their apartment to approximate the satisfaction they thought they would gain from living there, sense this—but not enough to change their ways. Just as the novel refuses the reader access to the protagonists’ individual thoughts, Anna and Tom can never quite get inside the happy life they’ve documented so meticulously. Selling their picture-perfect vision of contentment to other people, instead of themselves, is the closest thing to authenticity they can achieve.
Copyright © 2025 by Irene Katz Connelly. All rights reserved.