The central couple of Vincenzo Latronico’s fourth novel Perfection –– translated into English by Sophie Hughes and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions — are living the digital nomad dream c. 2015 when we first meet them: crafting brand identities, catalogues and interfaces for trendy businesses, having successfully uprooted themselves from an unspecified Southern European country of origin to build a new life in Berlin.

That much of the novel centres on their outward success — which only appears to require minor upkeep — is the key to its own triumph as an insidious but blistering satire of the white, middle class and now variously mobile zeitgeist.

Novels like Perfection are judgemental rather than satirical in the broader and more creatively energetic interpretation of that genre, but it’s Latronico’s unsentimental sharpness that makes it into something more than just a pained litany of complaints against a generalised — and generational — mass of people, one so keen for individualised gratification that they come out on the other end of that equation.

Anna and Tom are so thoroughly homogenised in their curated desires that Latronico almost always refers to them as a collective unit. The rare moments where this device is broken are also rare moments of rupture for the couple, but which scan as a relief for us. Could this be the point where some genuine self-awareness can creep in? Or at the very least, a shifting of gears, a recalibration?

The recalibration does come, as it happens, but in the end, only results in repetition. A relocation from Berlin — never fully a committed separation, more of a sabbatical — for more of the same in Lisbon, or Sicily. There is a parasitic dimension to these movements… which has of course become something of a truism in discussions around the phenomenon of 21st century gentrification. This is probably among the more caustic of Latronico’s landmines, cousins and variants of which are dotted all throughout the short, sharp sliver of a novel: the idea that Anna and Tom’s actual job is to serve as worker-ants in an ongoing gentrification project, all the while believing they are in fact agents of an unprecedented form of self-actualisation.

Their labour alienation reaches an apex that previous generations were at least spared from dreading: they are alienated from work they’re not even aware they’re engaged in executing. (Latronico shrewdly articulates the couple’s own arm’s length awareness of gentrification: they respond to it much in the same way that an unrepentant smoker shrugs off the threat of cancer, and anyway — they reassure themselves that they are never bona fide gentrifiers).

Latronico’s minimalism doesn’t allow for interiority, but this is what lends the novel its merciless hammer-drop. The whole novel essentially one long arc of a braining hammer, so it’s a mercy that it’s so short, lest byways of specificity and complexity upend its ‘perfect’ journey. We may wish for Anna and Tom to be rendered with more psychological complexity. Indeed, experiencing them as separate human beings would be a decent enough start.

But psychological realism would run the risk of scuppering the social and cultural realism that Latronico is going for here. There are numerous ways in which either Anna or Tom would be able to justify their lifestyle and its attendant ambitions through psychological byways, through reappropriated therapy-speak… because the neoliberal status quo has made a bedfellow out of all this, the closest equivalent we have to a spiritual resting point.

So in choosing to merely observe their motions through spare, unsentimental prose, we see just how oblivious their drive is; how the constant push towards the comforts of good taste for its own sake merely leads to hollow replication — an addiction whose cure can be indefinitely deferred because its damage is not so readily apparent.

This is how we are haunted out of life.

*

Reading Perfection brought to mind the Gen X variant of the ‘state of our time’ novels that I’d devour in my late teens and early twenties: choice cuts from Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh and the like. These writers were either hailed or reviled as often-gratuitous purveyors of their generation’s excesses: rubbing our faces in its nihilism and emptiness for the sheer sadistic — if not subversive — thrill of doing so.

But there was an undercurrent to my reading that I felt but never quite confronted, but I’m ready to confront it now because Perfection brought it bubbling back up and, I guess, I find myself in a less insecure space than that jittering post-teen used to occupy while thumbing through these books in between breaks and on buses while attending Sixth Form.

This is a deeply moral work. If not a spiritual one.

The hollowness it depicts is also a call to action. Of course, articulating it as such would break the spell of the shimmering, sharp minimalism of the work — would introduce that crucial element of earnest humanity into what is otherwise a mini-opus of ‘perfect’ cynicism.

But that is precisely how Latronico — and the previous writers I’ve mentioned, at their best — operates.

The status quo wants us to believe that Anna and Tom are the ultimate aspirational figures. Latronico spends upwards of 100 pages convincingly arguing otherwise.