The magic trick of “Perfection,” like “Things” before it, is to reveal readers to themselves—gently, in the way a therapist might encourage a patient to arrive at an unflattering truth. This original misapprehension might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility, Latronico suggests. You, contemporary reader, are the victim of poor training.... See more

Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive.

But by presenting “Perfection” (which was long-listed for the Booker Prize last month) as a self-conscious descendant of a sixty-year-old novel, Latronico invites us to wonder whether the very structure of our moods—which Anna and Tom believe are “new”—might not actually be more enduring than we imagine. Latronico was clearly drawn both to Perec’s... See more

Literary fiction lacks the right verb for what, exactly, Latronico is doing, which, in his granular allegiance to “Things,” is not unlike a musician covering a song or a showrunner adapting a foreign series. “Perfection” is “citational,” to quote Perec talking about his own work and that of his post-Surrealist peers, but Latronico achieves more... See more

Like the laptops on which they work and play, Anna and Tom’s aesthetic preferences are always on the brink of obsolescence, and checking for updates is a full-time, if passive, occupation. Just as Sylvie and Jérôme’s work in mid-century advertising was a job that “history had chosen for them,” Anna and Tom’s status as creatives (“a term even they... See more

Like many before them, Sylvie and Jérôme mistake their pursuit of taste for a pursuit of knowledge, and believe themselves to be acquiring a kind of legibility—to others and to themselves. Theirs is, in effect, “the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world.” By the novel’s penultimate page, the couple’s notion of happiness—a... See more

Like Sylvie and Jérôme, Anna and Tom move as one: they talk neither to each other nor to anyone else, and travel through a world littered with the supposedly-quiet-but-actually-quite-loud cultural signifiers of intellectualized upward mobility (houseplants, hardwood floors, unread back issues of this magazine).

“Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world,” we learn, “but they couldn’t even imagine it.”

the recognition—a relatively traditional one—that no new labor-saving devices or previously inconceivable technologies or counterintuitive whims of fashion can ever fundamentally alter what it feels like to be alive.