Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico Review

Anna and Tom are a young Italian couple living in Berlin, working their freelance, yet profitable, online advertising jobs. They have disposable income, they go to cool parties, they travel around Europe, and they document it all online to the supposed envy of their peers. They’re living the perfect life or are they oh wow I wonder if they’re not woah wouldn’t that be mind wooooahh

Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection may as well be called Duuuuh because of how obvious its messaging is. The novel could have ended after the first line of the second chapter: “Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures.” as that sums up its point and what follows doesn’t get much deeper than that. But why anyone would think a novel needed to be told around that shallowest of thoughts is a mystery and isn’t made any clearer by anything in the book.

What I disliked the most about the novel is Latronico’s storytelling approach. The story is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator, like it’s a parable, and we’re told everything - never shown - so we never find anything about the main characters ourselves. It makes for such a passive story that never really engages the reader as a result.

Not that “Anna” and “Tom” are actual characters - they may as well be called “Woman” and “Man” - because of Latronico’s style of telling and not showing, so that we never get to know anything about either of them and they’re permanently kept at arm’s length. I couldn’t picture either of them beyond generic young people and didn’t know anything of their personalities at all. Their social and professional lives revolve around being online, which is true of a lot of people, and which only makes them more indistinct.

Perhaps that’s the point though. This is a drawn-out critique of social media after all and maybe Latronico is saying that the people presenting these seemingly-perfect lives have their personalities replaced by what they post and so cease being real people through this fake, performative process? Even if that’s the aim, it still makes for a dull read - I would still prefer actual characters to symbols or ideas in a story.

The novel isn’t a total bore. As social media really takes off in the 2010s, life gets harder for the couple as more digital nomads start living their life and costs go up and they find their carefree lives trickier to navigate. At last, some actual conflict! It’s fleetingly interesting to see the couple deal with these new challenges of crappy clients, becoming their own victims of online advertising and finding constant travel and the never-ending search for the next popular photo post grating on their (assumed) psyches.

But it’s not much and, while Latronico is a decent writer - or describer at least - there isn’t enough to Perfection to entertain the reader. Online life, for some people, is real life. Social media is often contrived and the people who live for likes and comments tend to lead empty, unhappy lives. Like I said: Duuuuh. Nobody needs to read a novel that says obvious and inane things like these, especially when that novel - which is this novel - is far from compelling to read. Perfection? Not even close.