Book Review: Perfection by Vincenzo Petronico

Perfection
by Vincenzo Latronico
New York Review Books
pp 125

Vincenzo Latronico is a fine writer of descriptive sentences. The first chapter is a lengthy description of a post-modern home, albeit an apartment unit in Berlin, that could appear in Dwell Magazine. I immediately wondered if Dwell Magazine still exists and found that it does. The author of Perfection has another possible career direction. Instead of writing novels, he has the talent and skill to write copy for luxury design magazines.  

There are high standards for literary fiction. For a novel audaciously titled Perfection, there are many technical flaws. The use of which instead of who is irksome. So is dropping a word, describing only Indian in what should be an Indian restaurant. A paragraph-length sentence ends with the phrase occupied as standard. Another horrible phrase is join accumulate with a growing sense of imposture. I have no idea what these phrases mean. I wish I could read the Italian version to capture the subtlety of what might have been lost in translation.

Millennial couple Anna and Tom are two halves of the same dull leaf, vaguely similar, almost mirror images of one another, too afraid to be unlike one another. The author states, “Anna and Tom weren’t free to be themselves or rather free to reinvent themselves.” Together they amble through glossy high-tech design careers, while living the good life in trendy Berlin. They vacation in hotspots, do stints in Portugal and Sicily, always suffering from existential pain and the petty inconveniences of modern life. Yet the pics they posted on Facebook show an alternate reality—they weren’t really miserable; they were smiling and having a good time!

Petronico’s narrative describes Anna and Tom, and others in their social network, without expression or dialogue; therefore, there is no real sense of who they are beyond being vapid and faceless creatures that could have been easily conjured by AI. “They form a community more of a lattice than a circle, with relationships based on affinity and emulation, affection, intimacy, similarity, schadenfreude, and support.” Schadenfreude!!! Now we’re getting somewhere, but I’m not sure where.

There is a thread of nastiness burbling beneath the surface of Perfection. This slim volume is a stinging tongue-in-cheek satirical narrative about a shallow, homogenous culture, but it’s not a novel. A novel must have dialogue. Petronico has confessed in at least one interview that he cannot write dialogue. That might be the case, but even if an author does not have an ear for dialogue, practiced listening to people does eventually approach competence. Without dialogue, Anna and Tom are too deeply flawed to be characters. They are relegated to being names in a travelogue, left festering like dusty furniture in an apartment, with their plants, and all who dwell there.