A few years ago, a Hungarian friend took a break from university to move to Berlin. She lived in an old house just outside the city with several other young people, who huddled together for warmth in front of wood-burning stoves through a brutal northern German winter. The tenants paid for these sparse accommodations by helping to renovate an old brewery. The brewery, overseen by an East German-born architect and his wife, a Mexican seeress, was meant as a community space for artists, yoga practitioners, and other free spirits. My friend loved every minute of it.
If Brooklyn, New York, is the 21st-century capital of youth culture, Berlin is its techno-addled European cousin, drawing young people from across the continent to its louche nightlife and artsy atmosphere. Like Brooklyn, the city’s ascent has followed a certain trajectory. First, the artists and the weirdos moved in, drawn by the city’s low cost of living and abundant housing stock, much of it courtesy of the former German Democratic Republic. This quickly attracted other upwardly mobile young people, often employed in “creative” industries, who drove up rents and, through their tastes and habits, sanded down the city’s rough but distinctive edges.
Perfection, a newly translated novel from the Italian writer and Berlin resident Vincenzo Latronico, follows one such couple, who moved to the city from an unnamed country on Europe’s southern periphery. Anna and Tom aren’t really characters, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, they’re convenient stand-ins for a certain type of person. Not the artists or the vagrants — Anna and Tom aren’t much interested in renovating old breweries or squatting in abandoned East German factories. Instead, they belong to the international laptop class that followed in those bohemians’ wake. If you are a reader of a certain age who has sampled specialty coffee or worked remotely from a cafe, you will see at least a little of yourself in Anna and Tom. Perfection is very good at eliciting winces of recognition.
Because they’re archetypes, Anna and Tom make for inviting targets. When they experiment with sex toys, they’re sure to use “sustainably produced lube made with CBD oil.” Later in the book, a working vacation in warmer climes takes a predictable turn for the worse. Anyone who’s ever booked a bad Airbnb based on a few deceptively edited photos will nod along ruefully at these passages. According to Latronico, Perfection’s intentionally flat characters and spare, unadorned prose were inspired by a French novel called Things: A Story of the Sixties. Most readers will have to take his word for it. The book’s painstaking descriptions of Anna and Tom’s impeccably furnished apartment and curated social media output bring to mind Patrick Bateman’s meditations on pop music from American Psycho.
Like the characters he’s created, Latronico’s prose is intentionally shallow. His writing recalls the basic, functional English that has been adopted by expats, tourists, and digital nomads the world over. Alas, the effect quickly wears thin. Light “dances.” The early internet is “the stuff of legends.” While working, Anna and Tom enter a “flow state.” Perfection goes from witty to uninspired in the space of a few chapters.
Then there are Latronico’s observations, which are meant to be cutting, but are a bit like his millennial couple (and Berlin itself): namely, five or ten years out of date. Perfection is withering on the subject of its characters’ vague left-wing political commitments, which are exposed as well-meaning but vapid by Germany’s 2015 immigration crisis. But criticizing leftists for performative politics is not exactly a penetrating insight. Other observations are similarly predictable. The fading relevance of German in Germany’s capital city was noted by The Guardian over a decade ago. The notion of a disconnect between our real selves and our online personas, a theme Perfection hammers home through Anna and Tom’s virtual output, is so common that the idea itself has become meme-ified on social media.
Perfection spends considerable time chronicling the hip, minimalist aesthetics of the Millennial creative class, but this is also well-trod ground. In 2017, Kyle Chayka coined the term “airspace” to describe the sudden ubiquity of “raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs” in youthful enclaves across the globe. Naturally, Chayka’s essay starts with a quote from the co-founder of a Berlin consulting firm.
Towards the end of the book, Anna and Tom suddenly realize they’re getting older. They are confronted by “a younger crowd fresh out of Goldsmiths or Bard” who dress in “menacing Balenciaga and Vetements coats.” One thing Perfection does well is capture how disorienting it is for people who pride themselves on their taste and discernment to lose touch with the zeitgeist. Gen Zers have developed their own codes and customs that are deliberately inscrutable to their Millennial predecessors. Few people on the cusp of middle age have the energy to keep up with the club scene or the latest party drugs. Most of us instinctively understand that there is something sad about chasing trends into your 30s and 40s.
THE SPY WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
As Anna and Tom fade into middle-aged irrelevance, their lifestyle and the political and economic dispensation that allowed it to flourish are also on the verge of obsolescence. Once thought of as an economic and cultural panacea, globalization is suddenly in bad odor. Europe’s ongoing problems with immigration have prompted several Schengen countries to reintroduce border controls. Creative class jobs are in danger of being replaced by artificial intelligence. Like menacing zoomers in oversized designer clothes, it’s easy to discern new factors, from the second Trump term to the lingering effects of COVID-19 to the return of great power rivalries, that threaten the conditions that enabled Anna and Tom’s comfortable but unfulfilling lifestyle.
Some authors anticipate the future. Others capture a particular moment in time. Perfection will be of great use for future historians seeking to understand the habits and mores of the millennial creative class. What comes next is anyone’s guess.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
