On a bright September afternoon, the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico rolled a cigarette in a sun-drenched room in Milan. His home, like the apartment that opens his latest novel, “Perfection,” is a textbook illustration of the millennial penchant for displaying carefully curated lifestyle signifiers.
A monstera grew on a midcentury cabinet. The orange hues of a Le Creuset pan stood out against white kitchen shelves. There was a Berber rug and a Bauhaus armchair and a long table punctuated with Enzo Mari chairs. A pair of French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking the faded yellow walls of the Isola neighborhood.
He had recently returned to this conspicuous apartment after 13 years in Berlin. The move meant returning to the city he had left disillusioned when the squatting collective he was involved with lost its battle to Milan’s real estate developers.
“We were engaged in a big fight against the gentrification of Isola. We had an after-school program, we had the churches on our side, and for a while it seemed to be a model of really getting the neighborhood together.” He pointed his cigarette toward the balcony and laughed. “But as you can see, we lost.”
In his books, Mr. Latronico, a mustachioed 41-year-old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a single earring, portrays millennial characters who yearn for a better world. They want to end neoliberal globalization; they want to stop the gentrification of their neighborhood. In “Perfection,” a short novel shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize about a young expat couple in Berlin, the protagonists want a beautiful apartment.
Mr. Latronico had reflected on his own desire for that objective when, during the pandemic, he opened an Instagram account “because he was bored and lonely.”
“I started seeing that everyone’s apartment looked just like mine,” he said, admitting that he, too, has observed in himself a “kind of split” between his desires for political change and a refined lifestyle. “And I started seeing the origins — why did I want a Le Creuset? What was going on there?”
He sprang up suddenly from his chair. Fetching beers from the kitchen, he went on.
“It made me think, OK, so I want to write a book in which we see the impact the internet has on us, but it shouldn’t hinge on any specific platform or technology, because these change. So I faced out a bit and asked myself: How would you explain this to Cicero?”
But explaining social media culture to Cicero was not a simple task. In Berlin, Mr. Latronico had spent seven years trying and failing to write the novel he imagined.
“At first, I had a plot with a self-optimizer guru, but I realized that there is something about the way online dynamics play out that make them very hard and very boring to describe in a traditional novel,” he said. “And then I read Perec’s ‘Things,’ and I was like, man, this guy did it 50 years ago.”
Like a musician who samples an old disco beat and turns it into something modern, Mr. Latronico retold Georges Perec’s canonical 1965 novel “Things: A Story of the Sixties” — about a Parisian couple in marketing who obsessively desire consumer goods — and replaced the material objects with millennial lifestyle signifiers. Then he swapped the consumer culture of the 1960s for the social media-driven lifestyle of the 2010s.
He titled the novel after “Excellences & Perfections,” an online performance piece by the conceptual artist Amalia Ulman.
In Mr. Latronico’s book, Anna and Tom are graphic designers from “a large but peripheral Southern European city” who move to Berlin to reinvent themselves. They work on shiny laptops from plant-filled cafes, attend gallery openings and techno parties. They drink natural wine and single-origin coffee, carefully constructing a mythology of urban life that circulated “on the Instagram feeds of an entire generation.”
He said he was “deeply, deeply depressed” when he wrote it, and pessimistic about its prospects. He had planned to use any advance he might make from an Italian book deal to retrain as a carpenter or real estate agent. “I sent my agent an email and I said, ‘I’m sorry, this book is unpublishable. It has no dialogue. It has no plot. It’s a copy of another book.’”
“Perfection” became an international best seller. The novel has sold to 42 countries, and the English editions, translated by Sophie Hughes, have sold more than 85,000 copies.
“I think the zeitgeist has caught up with the sociological critique of the book,” said Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions, a tiny British publisher that has published three Nobel Prize winners since its founding a little more than a decade ago. “Perfection” is its best-selling book of the year, he said.
In an ironic twist, the book’s cover popped up in memes and on social media feeds all summer, like the lifestyle signifiers the novel satirizes. Last month, it was named to the longlist for the National Book Awards.
“There is a frisson between the aspiration of being a cosmopolitan or digital nomad and also wanting to make fun of these people,” said Nick During, the publicity director at New York Review of Books, the book’s U.S. publisher.
But the book taps into a more earnest feeling, too, said Lauren Oyler, a writer friend of Mr. Latronico’s. “It’s not a satire; it’s a commentary of what Vincenzo calls ‘a generation’s identical struggle for a different life,’” said Ms. Oyler, whose novel, “Fake Accounts,” also features a protagonist who moves to Berlin. (Ms. Oyler lives there herself.) “It’s the sadness of our generation. How we all participate in this global, digital economy and lifestyle.”
The ideas the novel plays with — how social media flattens culture, how desire is shaped by online images, the futility of building community through consumption — are drawn from Mr. Latronico’s own life.
Raised in Milan by middle-class parents, Mr. Latronico published his first novel at 24. The book, about a group of young activists journeying to the Genoa G8 protests, did “spectacularly bad,” he said. After his Isola squat collective lost its building, Mr. Latronico yearned to escape the politics of Italy.
In 2009, after receiving an insurance payment from a traffic accident, he moved to Berlin, attracted by the city’s low rents and its bohemian image. His second novel, about a Milan real estate developer battling a group of squatters, won the Premio Napoli and established Mr. Latronico as an upcoming voice in Italian fiction.
He described his life in 2010s Berlin as “very individualistic,” filled with art-world parties and visually pleasing dinners with new expat friends.
“I think I was gaslighting myself,” he said. “I was saying — I’m in Berlin, I’m living this perfect life, how could I ask for anything else? While, in fact, I was very lonely.”
On a warm Wednesday evening, Mr. Latronico had dinner at Gloria, a restaurant owned by his close friend Tommaso Melilli, a chef and food writer. Since Stanley Tucci featured Gloria in a TikTok video last year, the spot has been swarmed with Americans.
“This is like my second home,” said Mr. Latronico, sipping a glass of hazy wine.
When he returned to Milan, Mr. Latronico moved in with his fiancée, the literary agent Arianna Miazzo, and their two cats. (Mr. Latronico and Ms. Miazzo married this month.) He also co-founded a group chat for his friends in the literary community. They exchange hundreds of texts per day — “We are all freelancers, you know” — and roam Milan’s readings and parties together.
The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka appeared at the table, dressed in an outfit identical to Mr. Latronico’s — petrol-blue denim shirts over white crew-neck T-shirts.
Mr. Latronico told Mr. Chayka that a source of inspiration for “Perfection” was “Airspace,” Mr. Chayka’s 2016 essay arguing that internet culture had spread a homogenous aesthetic across the world.
“Every restaurant, in Buenos Aires or Milan or Berlin looks the same, with a monstera plant and a menu written on the blackboard,” Mr. Latronico said. “And somehow everyone thinks that this is expressing their personal style.”
Mr. Chayka laughed. “And yet here we are, drinking pet-nat and wearing matching outfits.”
Over the din of English-speaking voices, Mr. Latronico and Mr. Chayka discussed the changing aspirations of their generation. Having both entered middle age, they no longer yearned for the urban lifestyle of their youth. Topping off their glasses from a second bottle of wine, Mr. Latronico and Mr. Chayka discovered they had both thought about moving to the Southern European countryside.
It’s what the expat couple in “Perfection” set out to do after tiring of Berlin. Having gotten involved in activism during the 2015 migrant crisis, they discover they lack the tools to change anything: “Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world, but they couldn’t even imagine it.”
Now in their 30s, they return to their Mediterranean homeland, looking for “a feeling of freedom and adventure.”
“It’s such a millennial cliché,” Mr. Chayka said. “My wife and I actually talk about someday buying a farmhouse somewhere in Spain.”
“Ah, but don’t buy in Spain,” said Mr. Latronico with concern. “They have no water.”
He opened a real estate app on this phone and pulled up several houses in the hills of Piedmont.
“I really think I’ll buy one of these houses,” he said. “Up here, they will not run out water, and the temperatures are not too hot in the summer. And look at the prices.”
Mr. Chayka looked and licked his lips. “Can you send me the name of that area?”
The post The Novelist Who Knows What Millennials Want appeared first on New York Times.
