The best novel I read in 2025, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, is actually a bad novel. Not a terrible novel, exactly—it exhibits a high degree of technical proficiency. But it’s a very cold novel, existing entirely in the desert-like space that has grown in the wake of liberalism’s “dismantling” of “hierarchies, institutions, and cultures,” and outside of the “rich, ramifying networks of deeply human connection” that have traditionally been the raw material of the novelist.
The quotations here are from Christopher Caldwell’s 2020 review of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin, which extols Houellebecq for his refusal to pretend that such rich networks of connection exist any longer—the better to probe the atomization that characterizes our time. The risk is that said atomization provides meagre resources for the writing of novels, making Houellebecq’s achievements all the more impressive. The same is true of Perfection.
The novel, brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes, tells the story of Anna and Tom, a young couple from southern Europe (their home country is tellingly never specified) who have taken up residence in Berlin, where they work as freelance graphic designers. They are both talented and diligent and get along comfortably; they live in a trendy neighborhood in a beautiful apartment that they fill with beautiful things; they spend their free time going to clubs, art exhibits, and restaurants, taking advantage of everything the city has to offer. One immediately sees the problem where the writing of novels is concerned, for in truth there is nothing much to say about the couple: they aren’t involved in any real struggles, other than keeping track of which cafés offer high-speed internet; they don’t have any real projects; there is nothing for them to push back against and nothing pushing back against them. They can do whatever they want, whenever they want—they live in a boundless realm of pleasure.
But everything seems just a tad off. One interesting manifestation of this is the couple’s lovemaking, which is not exactly bad, but nor is it good: they have sex, and then realize that it was “the same sex they’d had last week, two months ago, three years ago”; they sometimes explore Berlin’s sex clubs, where people “seemed to be having a lot more fun,” but the experience always leaves them cold; they know they’re missing something, but don’t know exactly what it is. They try to volunteer their time during the migrant crisis of 2015, but given their lack of directly applicable skills, they find it “increasingly hard to feel useful,” and at last conclude that their efforts are “misguided, and probably pointless.” They try relocating to another global city—Lisbon—but soon “run out of ideas for what to do with their time.”
The novel’s chief strength, in other words, lies in its presentation of Anna and Tom’s struggle against . . . something. No matter what they do, they seem lacking in direction; a strange ennui takes over their lives, without there being any identifiable reason for it, and the experience of reading the novel is that of oneself becoming lost in this ennui. Latronico goes so far as to try to “theorize” their condition, but here the results are more mixed. He begins the sixth chapter by noting that the couple “lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.” The problem is thus framed as that of a Baudrillardian simulacrum: Anna and Tom live online rather than in the real world, or rather filter the latter through the former. And this, of course, suggests a solution: things would be better if they got rid of their screens and returned to a tangible, sensual reality.
The problem with this framing, however, is that it is contradicted, not so much by Anna and Tom as by their predecessors. Perfection is in fact a pastiche of Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Things, which deals with another twentysomething couple, Sylvie and Jérôme, who live in Paris and work in the then-new (at least in France) field of market research. Per its title, the novel deals with the couple’s never-ending effort to acquire better and better things: if only we had this or that antique engraving, piece of furniture, or pair of English shoes, they reason, everything would be fine. This is of course a fantasy, but it reveals a truth about advanced capitalist or (depending on how you want to frame the issue) technological society: namely, that things exist not in and of themselves, as ends, but only ever as means to other things (which themselves become means as soon as they are acquired)—as “signs,” to use a word of which Perec is fond, of things to come.
The problem, in other words, is not screens, which for Sylvie and Jérôme are next to nonexistent, but the fact that things themselves lose their borders, cease to cohere, become mere stations in a potentially infinite network, and this is true whether one moves, as for Sylvie and Jérôme, from thing to thing, or, as for Anna and Tom, from image to image; as Latronico states, in an observation that applies equally well to either couple, the life he is describing is that of a “flow state” in which people “drift from one thing to the other because one thing was the other.”
What, then, is the answer to all of this? This is not a question that Latronico addresses; his aim is simply to provide as accurate a picture as possible of our current condition, seen from a specific standpoint—that of “creatives” in global cities who have more in common with one another than their actual compatriots. But the very fact that the experience of reading the novel is so alienating leaves the reader with no doubt as to the threat of continuing to live in a world without ends, and no option but to begin to imagine a way out of it. For this alone, Perfection, for all its limitations, is a smashing success.
Image Credit: Edward Hopper, “Rooms by the Sea” (1951)
