Halfway through his acclaimed novel Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico inserts a particularly revealing episode. It is 2015 and Anna and Tom are both graphic designers, working in one of Berlin’s trendiest neighborhoods. Their comfortable life is suddenly interrupted, however, when a picture surfaces on social media and soon goes viral. It is an image of Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian boy whose body was found washed up off the coast of Turkey and photographed by local rescue workers lying face down in the sand. Jolted out of their state of apathy, Anna and Tom decide to start volunteering at a local refugee center.
Initially, the couple like their work. As Latronico describes, they enjoy feeling part of something bigger than themselves and feel as if they are engaged in a “rendezvous with history.” Gradually though, the novelty starts to wear off. Anna and Tom grow bored with the tasks they’ve been assigned, and when cell phones are banned on-site, they react with outrage. How else will their followers know what they’ve been up to? With surprising ease, the couple soon forget about the body of Alan Kurdi and withdraw to the safety of their regular lives. From the comfort of their apartment in Berlin, they wait patiently for a new atrocity to interrupt their doomscrolling and pierce the carapace of their political ennui.
Perfection is part of a wave of novels satirizing millennial life, and it is clear that Latronico intends Anna and Tom’s narrative to make liberal readers squirm. However, the lessons to be drawn from this episode are relevant to parties far beyond the liberal cosmopolitan readership Perfection attracted. Across the West, political discourse is increasingly shaped by the boom-and-bust cycle of viral outrage. Singular events become political flash points, triggering bursts of energy that rarely translate into longer term engagement, burning bright at first then disappearing just as fast. The result, as Perfection ingeniously demonstrates, is a…
Auteur: John Livesey
