On Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

There is a refrain among Millennials so common as to be trite. This, we say, is the last generation that entered a world without The Web. We’re a bridge between the “simplicity” of the 20^th Century and the hyperreal digital swirl of the 21^st. Inheritors of a cultural apotheosis wrought by a century of slaughter, it seemed the most natural thing to take what came before and advance it into code. That our most productive learning years coincided with the growth of the internet meant we looked set to rule the roost. If the internet is limitless and I am at home there, my life may also be free of limits.

Or that’s how it was supposed to go, anyways. Half of that equation turned out to be correct. Digital life does seem to have no end; it has evolved into a contest to see who can brute force their way into digging the deepest possible hole. Up until now, it was like a battle waged between those digging with bare hands (Gen X, Boomers, etc.) as against those with shovels (Millennials). Then the new kids showed up with excavators. Suddenly, we too were outdated. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Forever ended up lasting about a decade.

Perfection can be seen as a sort of chronicle of this rise and fall. A totem of what was promised (by whom?) and how it actually turned out, the joke of its slim 120 pages or so is not lost on me. 10 years, supposedly some of the most productive, exciting, and meaningful of your life, shrunk to 120 prosaic sheets of paper. Hilarious. 

If you’re mildly in tune with contemporary publishing, you know the gist. Latronico takes the image of the Millennial everyman and gets to prosaically stabbing. In a narrow sense his target is the idea of the digital nomad—those whose careers are so inextricably linked to online production that they transcend office space. Able to (theoretically) dash from city to city across borders, they represent a sort of pioneer class. You can be anywhere in the world and still right here, where graphic design is your passion. Their transience is envied; their reality is shallow. While Anna and Tom, Latronico’s dialogue-free protagonists, come in for their share of lashes at the hands of a disinterested and mildly disdainful narrator, an entire generation is actually on trial here. Ever tried your hand at a semblance of portraying a curated version of your life to the world? Then this is a novel about you, me, and everyone in our age cohort.

I don’t have much to say about the Millennial bashing. It can be fun (because often true) and everyone, young and old, enjoys getting in on the action. A generation constantly wound up by a series of perceived and potential betrayals of what was promised is also perpetually playing at a game where we seek share-worthy evidence that our reality is more than meets the eye. We knowingly build the layout of our own mirages and get upset when there is no there there. If you can’t get some easy shots in on this group, you’re hopeless.

What is more interesting to me are the subtle notes in the novel. Take out your presuppositions about Millennials and view this as an anthropological work. The sense of a boundless world in the making was, indeed, accompanied by increasing visibility of alternative lifestyles. Not outright social acceptance, no, but a space to rethink what could move from the boundaries of “transgression” into the edges of hesitant acceptance. That Latronico places his characters in Berlin amid a zeitgeist of change thus takes on an unspoken importance. This place was once the site of another brief but heady era when the cultural imaginings of the possible were expanded further than anyone could’ve predicted just a scant few years before. 

As the capital of Germany and a vaunted center of Europe, Berlin takes on an importance so outsized as to cast everything about it into shadow. It is from those shadows where the reaction inevitably festers. In Perfection, the dreamed-of life hints at obstacles: locals who resent their uprooting at the hands of outsiders who haven’t real interest in integrating, a state apparatus whose language tends to stop you in your tracks (Finanzamt, Anmeldung, Meldebeschinigung, usw.), the not-so-quiet concerns of friends and family wondering what, exactly, you’re up to. The barbarians aren’t at the gates, but they haven’t completely disappeared, either, and they think they’ve got something to fight for. Contrast that with Anna and Tom who seem to have lost any faith in the projects of their lives (until a twist ending saves the day). When push comes to shove, which side has the potential to push harder: the drifting 30 somethings or the obscured masses just outside the frame of another stylized Instagram post? History gives us a pretty good idea how that might turn out. Can’t you hear the drumbeats?