The Aesthetic Life
In 1960, writer Raymond Queneau and writer-engineer François Le Lionnais founded Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a predominantly French-speaking group of writers and mathematicians, whose aim was to liberate creativity by imposing a set of formal and methodological rules on the writing process. Typical exercises included the N+7 method, which replaces every noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary, or Queneau’s Exercises in Style, where the same anecdote is retold in 99 different ways. If one of Modernism’s aims was to overturn the sturdy and universal moral codes of the nineteeth-century novel by focusing on subjectivity and stylistic experimentation, then in some ways Oulipo can be seen as its logical end point. ‘I set myself rules in order to be totally free,’ said Georges Perec, who joined Oulipo in 1967 as the group’s youngest member.
Though Perec wasn’t translated into English until 1988, he was a bestseller in France, famous for his Oulipian experiments like La Disparition, which contained no ‘e’s, Les Revenentes, which contained only ‘e’s, and Life: A User’s Manual, which describes the contents and inhabitants of a Paris apartment block, ten stories high and ten units wide, along the route a knight would take on a 10×10 chess board without stepping on the same square twice. Things: A Story of the Sixties might seem like one of Perec’s more formally conventional novels; it tells the story of a young French couple, Sylvie and Jerôme (and through them, the story of their generation), by describing their relationship with their belongings, tastes and material desires. Widely regarded as a denunciation of consumer capitalism, Things was rapidly translated across the former Soviet block, though as Perec’s biographer, David Bellos, notes in his introduction, the writer himself did not see it that way. For him, Things was a novel of complete ambiguity, no more an indictment of passionate materialism than a celebration of it.
Several broadly millennial acquaintances confess that reading the book made them feel a sort of sickening recognition.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes and published by Fitzcarraldo this February, adapts Things for the twenty-first century. It does not do it through veiled suggestion: Latronico states as much in his acknowledgements. It is a clever concept. The transplant makes sense, and Latronico manages to create a world that is both unmistakably of its time, and, thanks to the analogous story sixty years prior, outside of time altogether.
In Things, Sylvie and Jerôme live on the Left Bank and work in advertising as market researchers. They covet a plush fitted carpet, a palette of ‘browns, ochres, duns and yellows’, English tailoring. Pâté and lush cheeses. They become involved, not very deeply, with politics via the Algerian war. They consider, but do not take (until the very end) executive level jobs. They move to a newly liberated Tunisia, where, desiring nothing that is available to buy, they start to feel like they no longer exist. They move back to Paris and eventually leave it for Bordeaux. Anna and Tom, Perfection’s protagonists, are an expat couple from an unnamed Southern European city, living in Berlin. They are freelance digital creatives. Their flat has honey coloured floorboards, monstera plants, Scandinavian furniture, a kitchen covered in subway tiles. They go to openings, restaurants, clubs. They attend, but do not partake in sex parties. They try, not very successfully, to volunteer during the refugee crisis. They try stints in Sicily, and bicker about not having gone to Greece, then in Lisbon, which is similar to Berlin but isn’t Berlin, and where they do not find a good reason to stay. Eventually, they inherit a farmhouse from a childless relative, which they turn, with raw bedlinen and enamel tableware, into a ‘Mediterranean and yet unmistakably international’ B&B.
In early 2025, Perfection was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Around this time, I began to see several broadly millennial acquaintances confess that reading the book made them feel a sort of sickening recognition. Reviews of the book echoed this: ‘like staring into a mirror for the first time, unsure whether to be struck by wonder or terror,’ (Chris Allnutt). ‘I recognise Anna and Tom in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection because I am them… I felt attacked, as they say online,’ (Kyle Chayka). ‘To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you’ve helped create,’ (Madeleine Watts).
What, exactly, is the source of this discomfort? It is unlikely to be simple recognition: ‘millennial culture’ has come to include trends across behaviour, consumption, design and so on, in such a totalising way that even the most eccentric of readers will likely discover something Latronico describes in their peripheral vision, or wince at familiarities in lifestyle. And, while their tastes are precise, Anna and Tom themselves are vague: they never speak (there is no dialogue in Perfection) and they do not exist away from each other; they are a smooth, unified surface for projection.
One part of it might be the implicit failure of imagination. Berlin, a site of significant recent history, with affordable housing, better work-life balance and abundantly available communal spaces feels like a land of opportunity, where Anna and Tom lead a life no different to those led in any other major city; ‘no different,’ the reader might think, ‘to mine’. ‘Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world,’ Latronico writes, ‘but they couldn’t even imagine it.’ Another, perhaps, is the breaking down of image culture, the continuous curation of aesthetics, the yearning to close the gap between life and its public image. Latronico captures well the way desires and pleasures cross from the physical world to the digital: the pleasure of cooking and eating a beautiful meal mixing with the visual pleasure of plating, and the more intangible pleasure of sharing photos of it online. ‘They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them and there were the images, also all around them.’
The tension isn’t between having and not having, but between having the right vs the wrong thing.
But does Latronico, indeed, capture the creation of such a culture? The individual choices involved in its upkeep? Money is an unofficial character in Things, central to Sylvie and Jerôme’s lives, a constant source of push and pull. The things they desire are not in a vacuum, they are not easily fulfilled. ‘They were condemned to conquest,’ writes Perec, ‘They could become richer and richer, but there was no way they could have always been rich.’ Money is conspicuously absent from Perfection, both as a part of daily life and as a political signifier. Anna and Tom’s flat is affordable, especially as they are able to put it up for short lets while they travel. Sometimes when a job ends sooner than they anticipated, they might experience some anxiety, but never for long. They have enough of it, but they do not flaunt it and they certainly don’t discuss it with friends. The tension isn’t between having and not having, but between having the right vs the wrong thing.
There is rationale in keeping the book as apolitical as Anna and Tom’s lives feel, but it leaves the stakes of the story difficult to decipher, their inner worlds only legible through the skew of the nameless narrator. We can see how the logic of aesthetics has permeated everything else (they become involved with the refugee crisis, because they understand that it is something they should be seen to care about) but not how, or why, they have ended up this way, or what’s at stake when doing the right thing is as easy as making whatever you’re doing look right.
Latronico’s explanation is contained in Anna and Tom being digital natives who came of age on MySpace, growing up with ‘the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.’ It is one thing to write a novel that lets readers internally scream ‘meeeee’, but another still to depict the psychological and emotional stakes of its world. Latronico posits, but does not answer the question: what happens when we create a life for ourselves where we can feel always, relentlessly right? Where our choices are constantly validated, and reflected back to us?
Allegro Pastel, Leif Randt’s 2020 novel (published in English by Granta in 2025) follows another couple: Tanja and the conveniently named Jerome. They are a writer and a web designer in a long-distance relationship between Berlin and Maintal. Tanja has enjoyed relative success after the publication of her first novel, PanoptikumNeu, about ‘a virtual reality experience shared by four male friends in an abandoned rural boarding school’, and its web series adaptation ‘filmed on Samsung Galaxy S7s’. Tanja’s parents are still married and live in Kiel, her sister, Sarah, whom she sees semi-regularly is a depressive filmmaker. Jerome’s parents are divorced; he lives in their old family home. When they are together, they get takeaway, have pretty good sex and argue about Call Me By Your Name. When apart, they text each other about their drug experiences. Jerome is an oppressive optimist who prefers the path of least resistance, which he somehow also manages to turn into the most self-affirming option. At a dinner he decides to bond with a man he suspects Tanja had been romantically involved with: ‘As a rule, men who liked the same women often got along with one another very well; it was just that most men weren’t intelligent enough to cultivate these connections.’
Where Perfection contains no internal monologue, Allegro Pastel is nothing but. We are in Tanja and Jerome’s heads constantly, and in their heads are reflections on love, life and other people that could be straight out of a Victorian novel, except that aesthetics have replaced morality as an organising principle. While Randt’s narrator is not so different from Latronico’s – semi-ironic, not entirely unsympathetic – if perhaps a touch more on the dopey side, he manages to draw attention to the blink-and-you-might-miss-it interactions that make up a relationship, rather than apply a sweeping, generational diagnostic. Randt’s occasional lapses into linguistic parody – like naming a popular party ‘Cocktail d’Amore’ or a fashion brand ‘ComprondeVT’ – are a good vehicle for this. Like in Things and Perfection, Randt’s narrator describes the artefacts of taste in Tanja and Jerome’s world to minute detail, except they read more like poker-faced punchlines: Jerome driving a Tesla while listening to Bladee, a wedding menu of generic Asian food.
Tanja and Jerome’s relationship runs along without significant friction, partly because they reflect their own beliefs and aesthetic choices back to each other and partly because conflict would mean entertaining the possibility of having made a mistake. In a scene that is both laughably banal and unbearably tense, Tanja takes Jerome to the sports store Decathlon. Posting stories from the store has become a recurring motif of Tanja’s online presence, as has wearing Decathlon’s own-brand clothing. It’s Tanja’s birthday and, since they are about to play a round of badminton, she wants Jerome to buy a pair of Decathlon badminton shoes. The shoes resemble the shape of the fashionable trainers du jour, but, crucially, are not them. Jerome is unsure whether it is worth buying them for a single badminton session. It becomes clear that not buying them would be very, very bad. He relents. We can breathe.
Aesthetics, like morality, requires continuous decision making, a separation of right from wrong. It requires rules, and adhering to them. ‘You’ve constructed so many rules for yourself, so many stylistic regulations and codices, you don’t even see them anymore…’ says Ulla, Tanja’s therapist mother. It is not a bad organising system, especially for an image-led life, except that its limitations are similar too: eventually you begin to crave a loss of control over your own rules. Jerome works diligently on Tanja’s website, ‘tanja.arnheim.space’, which he plans to present to her on her 30th birthday. He believes that he has managed to codify into it something that is essential to her being. He has, but it has the opposite of the desired effect: Tanja is distraught. ‘I feel like when I think about this website I’m thinking about myself,’ she says. ‘It gets to me a little that you can read me so well. It’s like you’ve been spying on me.’ Shortly after her birthday dinner, she abruptly ghosts Jerome and begins an affair with her friend Amalie’s on-off boyfriend, Janis, and falls out with her as a result. She does not entirely understand her attraction to him, partly because she hates tattoos, and Janis has many of them.
Here we are no longer reading good-natured satire of millennial life, we are simply experiencing the raw messiness of involving yourself in any relationship.
Jerome, meanwhile, after some pining and self-flagellation, runs into and begins dating Marlene, a woman he had fancied in primary school. Their affair, like most things in Janis’ life, is easy. They like enough of the same things and have sex that, with time, could be ‘OK or even very good’. He takes up correspondence with Tanja again, which we see through email exchanges with subject lines like ‘Intolerable’, ‘The Power of Now’ and ‘What I Have To Say’. In these, their relationship reaches a sort of performative fever pitch. Jerome dissects the act of recording a voicemail: ‘In the first take, I started stuttering at one point. You could hear my voice failing. It was actually a nice effect, which I would have liked to have reproduced in the final message.’ Tanja, ever the perfectionist, gets it right the first time. They decide to attend a wedding together and take ecstasy. They get back together, then break up again.
In the novel’s final section, life has moved on. Tanja makes up with her estranged friend Amelie, and Jerome, to his surprise, is having a kid. Allegro Pastel’s second half is both denser and more confused than the first, hard to read, especially after we become so intimately acquainted with the rules and structures that make Tanja and Jerome tick.
Here we are no longer reading good-natured satire of millennial life, we are simply experiencing the raw messiness of involving yourself in any relationship. The novel ends with an email from Tanja to Jerome, in which she apologises for reacting to news of his fatherhood apathetically on the phone. She writes about the life they could have had together, ‘moving to different continents at the same time, to Seoul and Vancouver for example. We could have met up in Europe every six months to party in liberal clubs and sleep together in hotel rooms.’ Then about the lives they will have: ‘I’ll come to visit you and your kid. The cliché would be for it to tear me apart. In reality, I’ll handle it all remarkably well.’ A final, unconvincing attempt at control.
Millennial life is not without stakes, and neither are those stakes boredom and dissatisfaction. They are finality, losing control, having to grapple with making mistakes. They are, in other words, what the stakes have always been.
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Zsófia Paulikovics is a writer based in London.
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