Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Good Taste?
The worry that taste is deceptive or distracting haunts seemingly every narrative in which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders how she failed to notice her husband’s unhappiness, and asks how he might have failed to notice it for himself. “I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he tells her. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” It’s a brutal way to leave a marriage. And yet later a friend tells Burden that the divorce has liberated her real personality, revealing someone who is “lighter, easier, more relaxed. . . . You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.” Living tastefully requires making many small, good decisions, and doing this successfully can give you the sensation of heading in the right direction. But the risk of crafting a picture-perfect life is that you’ll lose sight of the big picture.
Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection,” are “creative professionals” living as expats in Berlin. “Their exact titles varied depending on the job,” Latronico writes. “Web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist”—the bottom line is that they create “differences.” When a new boutique hotel opens, it needs to communicate its uniqueness within the crowded landscape of taste. Anna and Tom accomplish this through minute shifts to the color palette, or the nuanced application of fonts. “Their style was simple, intimate, in keeping with an aesthetic that was starting to be seen all over the world,” Latronico explains—a “casual coolness” familiar from “every gourmet burger joint and concert poster.”
The couple’s good taste flows from their screens into the physical world, and then back into their screens. On social media, they see an endless grid of airy apartments filled with “stunning plants in bay windows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.” Soon, their apartment is a greenhouse, too—“Plants appeared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill,” Latronico writes—and this enriches the photographs that they post, when they list their apartment online, so that tourists can rent it. Similarly, after years of making the same sandwiches and spaghetti sauce, they become serious cooks, along with everyone else. Dinners at friends’ houses suddenly involve “elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit,” and each course is “accompanied by a chorus of compliments and technical remarks.” Latronico notes that “their interest hadn’t been planted by sly marketers, but appeared as if by osmosis, as they observed the little differences all around them.” As members of a tasteful generation, “they were all learning together.”
Collecting vinyl, clubbing at Berghain, contemplating polyamory—this is cool. But Anna and Tom don’t feel free. They’re trapped in the taste matrix that they’ve helped construct. It was their own good taste, after all, that originally compelled them to flee their provincial home town for Berlin; when newer incoming cool-hunters push up the cost of living in the city, it’s taste that nudges them toward Lisbon (“the new Berlin”), where they hope to repeat the cycle. The problem is that data moves faster than they do. When dinner-party pictures can instantaneously travel “to the other end of the planet, bouncing along in low Earth orbit or speeding across ocean ridges,” meaningful distinctions can’t last. In Lisbon, “it was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same.”
There’s something science-fictional about “Perfection,” and yet it’s an accurate account of how modern taste makes itself felt. Taste is a global force, driving migrations, shifting investments, and dividing us into groups and tribes. Because it’s been so heavily technologized, it now feels unitary, omnipresent—like a wave that sweeps us up but never breaks. Philosophers describe the “problem of expensive tastes”; today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities. For Anna and Tom, that dynamic leads to exile. Driven out of the place they’re from, they’re priced out of most places they might want to go, and can’t be content in the ones they can afford. By the closing act of the novel, although their taste is everywhere, they’re citizens of nowhere.
