Perfection

I decided to take the doors off my kitchen cupboards for a reason. Or perhaps for two. Firstly, I don’t particularly like my kitchen. Not the shiny white rectangular tiles or the matte charcoal-blue laminate surfaces or the nondescript light grey cupboard doors that conceal all of the objects I love. That’s the second reason. I want to exhibit my curation. As the creative director of my house, I am careful to express myself through trinkets and treasure, paint colours and material choices, objects and artworks.

And so six months after I moved in, I removed the doors and painted the fronts a glossy pea green, having seen someone paint their kitchen door a near identical colour, somewhere on the north coast of California, where their life of renovating an old cottage with three friends looked so shiny and brilliant that I believed using the same paint – colour and brand – would bring me one step closer to that.

In the mornings, I walk down the stairs and step into a near-perfect oasis. There’s the tile-topped, folk art table I sourced from a vintage shop in west London, provenance: Scandinavia in the 1960s. There’s the old farmhouse chair I picked up from a vintage dealer down the road. The art deco ceramic tiled woodburner and the mid-century Ercol two-seater sofa, patterned with some rural hunting scene that feels whimsical and fits snugly between the fireplace and the door. There’s the kitchen I don’t particularly like, filled with handmade objects that I love – a sea of earth-toned ceramics and wooden boards, sourced from various cities and invariably ‘one of a kind’.

'One Of A Kind'

You’d be forgiven for thinking I was some character in Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, where the earnest, moneyed millennial kingdom (within which I firmly live) is keenly observed and lightly skewered throughout. I can’t tell if it adds to the irony that the novel is written by someone who looks like the epitome of such millennial mileu; or that it’s published by Fitzcaraldo, the ultimate cerulean blue signifier of the literary elite. Having just read the book in one fell swoop, my mind is swirling with questions and curiosities, especially as someone whose pursuits are largely similar to those observed in Latronico’s house-plant filled, sans serif typed, virtue-signalling world.

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It’s important to be self-aware. I am middle class, work in a creative industry as a freelancer. I would never dare call myself a ‘digital nomad’ but I know that is what I technically am. I don’t ‘go on holiday’; I ‘work from wherever I am’ and spend about 3-4 months a year not in my own home. I consider myself a collector of objects and experiences, which when written down, makes me want to throw up in my mouth. But if I’m honest, this type of existence is joyful to me, and I’m aware of my privilege to enjoy it in this way.

Within the first two pages of Perfection, I felt attacked. This is a phrase many of my other friends have expressed when reading the novel – because friendships are often echo chambers, so these are people who might identify in the same way as I do – and I spent the rest of the book absorbing refrains and sentences and implications that made me feel both seen and very uncomfortable. Of course, that is the point Latronico is making. In a New York Times article, he explains he was ‘deeply, deeply depressed’ when he was writing this novel. Observing the flattening of culture, the insecurity of true individuality, or as Lauren Oyler puts it, “a generation’s identical struggle for a different life”.

I think it’s important that we don’t offer too much sympathy for this millennial, middle class affliction. But what I take from this novel is a conversation about this flattening of culture. The internet has offered us many things, but in all its accessibility and availability of information, it has simultaneously given us a more myopic lens through which to view life. The ‘same same but different’ adage rings true in the middle-class, millennial aesthetic: we are copy cats, often afraid to step outside of the accepted way of appearing, because there is too much of a microscope put on our collective lives to feel like we live them without acute observation.

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Perfection persists in another home – the corporeal one I cannot choose to vacate or knock down and reconstruct. I have been caught between its reality and the perfection projected onto me for decades, and in the same way that I curate little corners of physical spaces, I find ways of doing so with my body. I decorate my face with pale streaks of blush; I wear certain clothes to accentuate the bits I like, and hide the parts I hate; I lie out in the sun to get browner and mask the idiosyncrasies of my form. I take selfies to get the right angles and dismiss pictures taken of me that do not come even close to perfection. Of course rationally and logically I know that the imperfections we hate in ourselves are often what people love most about us. Or, at least, they are aspects that simply do not register in someone else’s less neurotic mind.

Reading Latronico’s novel, I was struck by this strange obsession we have with how we are perceived. Perfection comes hand in hand with perception, and unfortunately we live in a world where perception feels like everything. Everything and everyone is a mirror. I’m still not sure exactly what to take from Perfection. If perfection holds hands with perception, and I’m reading this book wondering how I might be perceived within its context… well, I guess that might be the point.