The first time I visited the city, I was told about a tote bag that says “Berlin: If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.” With cheap rents, cheaper food, bars you can still smoke in, the world’s coolest nightclub, cafés on every street corner, respected art galleries both indie and blue-chip, the German capital became the last great bohemian hope. It’s the rare place where money doesn’t seem to be the primary motivating factor behind every decision that hasn’t fallen into irrelevance. There are squats and grand cathedrals stained by centuries of dirt, and vintage shops that open for a few hours in the afternoon, if you’re lucky. But then there’s also a Supreme store. During the Merkel era, hordes of the international creative class moved to the city, first from continental Europe and then the Anglosphere. They came in search of a better life, of leisure and relevance and the freedom to pursue a career in the arts, or at least something adjacent. Two such dreamers are Anna and Tom, the subjects of Vincenzo Latronico’s new novel, Perfection.

The novel opens with descriptions of photos of an apartment decorated like a 2010s starter pack: Scandinavian furniture, monstera and fiddle-leaf fig, Berber rug, Taschen art books, mason jars, and cast-iron pans:

The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated. It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet…. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker: between intense bursts of concentration at a desk there might be a walk, a videocall with a friend who has an idea for a new project, some jokes exchanged on social media, a quick trip to the nearby farmers’ market.

These photos could appear on the Instagram accounts belonging to any number of your peers, but they’ve been posted to a short-term rental site, where the couple sublet their Neukölln apartment for €118 per day, plus cleaning fee. An Instagram post and real estate listing are doing the same thing to varying degrees—selling a meaningful life as a succession of easily attainable commodities. As Latronico writes, “The environment where they slept and worked, and which they themselves had chosen and shaped, was the one tangible manifestation of who they were.” (The novel’s second chapter is titled “Imperfect,” recalling Perfectly Imperfect, the newsletter about what influencers consume.)

Anna and Tom don’t think their lives are contrived—no one does. Hailing from an unnamed “large but peripheral southern European city,” the couple move to Berlin in their early 20s to reinvent themselves and escape a life “on a fixed set of tracks: the same old neighborhoods, the same summer spots, the same friends they’d had since school.” Having grown up tinkering with GeoCities and JavaScript, the couple now work in the amorphous zone of graphic design, branding, and Web development. Their clients are largely from back home, not Germany. They have a revolving door of friends (also young creatives) from across the continent, but rarely hang out with the locals. Accented English is the lingua franca; they speak just enough German to navigate the bureaucracy. Their weekends in the city are an increasingly inebriated 36-hour crawl from park to brunch to gallery openings to clubs to coming down in Tempelhof, the former airport turned park that Anna and Tom think of not as an underdeveloped plot of land but as a “reservoir of potential futures.” Members of the parade fall away and new ones join, without losing the integrity of the initial meetup, something Latronico movingly compares to the Ship of Theseus.

There’s an inertia to these passages that really does capture the misbegotten sense of joy and possibility of a night out in one’s 20s:

You could tell a gallery from all the way up the street by the little huddles of people under a neon glow, by the empties piled up around plastic beer crates on the pavement…. Then they would plan their next stop: an independent art space above a car wash in Friedrichshain; a former furniture shop on Torstraße; the basement gallery on Graefestraße whose parties were so notoriously packed with new arrivals that it was nicknamed “the Italian Embassy.” They would plan their route and set off, leaving any stragglers behind, confident they would catch up again somewhere along the way.

Later:

They would still be drunk and high, vibratile, the bass booming on in their ears. They would imagine how they must look to the outside world with their aching cheekbones drawn into fixed grins, their clothes smeared with cigarette ash and sweat, and still carrying the odd trace of dimly remembered adventures: a marker pen scribble on their face; a garland of fake frangipani in their pocket; a bunch of helium balloons tied to their jacket buttons and now trailing, half-deflated, like comet tails. They would feel decadent and enviable, alive.

For years, this is what it was all about, and that was enough.

Eventually, other worries creep in. Anna and Tom fear that their sex life isn’t as hot as it should be. University sweethearts, the couple have long since settled into a routine: Postcoital, “a thought would worm its way into that bliss: that was the same sex they’d had last week, two months ago, three years ago. Looking at it objectively, it probably was on the short side. And unimaginative, perhaps?” Berlin is notorious for its nightlife options, and it’s unclear if Anna and Tom actually have a problem or if it’s just a case of keeping up with the Müllers. They buy sex toys but find them intimidating and lacking in spontaneity. Occasionally they visit sex clubs in search of a third person, but they inevitably find an excuse not to go through with it. They convince themselves that adventurous sex is nothing compared to the deep love they share, then feel pathetic for thinking that.

Anna and Tom settle in other ways, too. Their careers stagnate, and they postpone plans to open up their own agency. They know they don’t want children. They have a loose circle of surface-level friendships, easily lost and easily replaced as one person moves away and another takes their place. Through it all, they maintain an enviable social media presence, impressing their old friends back home—friends who now give off “a hint of provincial insularity,” stuck as they are in the same city, hanging out with the same people from high school, barely able to speak English. By contrast, Anna and Tom “inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher. They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.”

Are we supposed to hate these people? It wouldn’t be difficult. They prominently display, in their living room, a limited-edition vinyl version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows. They think they hang out in the former East Berlin, not even realizing that the expat hot spots of Kreuzberg and Neukölln are actually in the West. They don’t actually care about contemporary art; they go to galleries for the social benefits, and to monitor the trends that will inform their Web design work. This narcissism of small differences is compounded by the fact that the novel takes place roughly a decade ago—there are mentions of filtered selfies, the ice bucket challenge, and a passion for sans serif fonts. They have conflicted feelings about Hillary Clinton, whom they admire “as a woman” but dislike for, of all things, “her ties to the pharmaceutical industry.” Cranked up a few more levels, Perfection could be a Thomas Bernhard novel called The Posers, or maybe just The Millennials.

One clue for how to approach these characters is found in Perfection’s acknowledgments. Latronico writes that the book began as a tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties, the 1965 debut of Georges Perec. That novel, written in the wake of the postwar commercial boom, tells the story of Jérôme and Sylvie, a young Parisian couple longing for the budget to match their smart taste. The books are nearly identical in structure and length (around 120 pages), following the couples as they navigate the changing times against the backdrop of their own aging. The homage is intentional and explicit: There is the promise of youth, followed by a growing sense of unfulfillment. Jérôme and Sylvie are briefly reenergized by demonstrations against the war in Algeria. Anna and Tom become volunteers at camps for Syrian refugees. Both couples’ forays into civic participation soon fall flat. In the latter case, the bedbugs that New Yorkers have brought to Berlin foil a donation drive, while in the former, the futility of their protests, combined with the holiday season in Paris, prompt the couple to abandon their anti-fascist activism. In Things, “They could not have said exactly what it was that changed when the war ended.” In Perfection, “They couldn’t say exactly what had changed after the immediate urgency of the migration crisis passed.” The couples eventually realize they aren’t cut out for Paris or Berlin: Jérôme and Sylvie decamp to Tunisia, while Anna and Tom go to Lisbon, then Sicily.

Translator David Bellos, in a 1990 edition of Things, writes in his introduction that the novel was received as an attack on consumerism, but that Perec’s stated goal was to neutrally describe, “in barely heightened terms,” his own social milieu. The intervening decades have removed the barb from Perec’s novel, making the reading experience less personal and more like listening to “A Well Respected Man” or “Part Time Punks.” Perfection stings, because its diagnoses are fairly spot-on. It’s a Berlin novel, to be sure, but change some of the proper nouns and remove the mentions of low rent and it could be about life in New York or any other major city, where for a lucky chunk of the population, the period of low-friction post-adolescence can extend for decades.

Trying to recapture that old feeling of endless potential, Anna and Tom sublet their apartment and head south. In Lisbon, they are hired to develop the visual style for a new boutique hotel, accepting lower rates in exchange for free lodging. They try to convince themselves that the Portuguese city could be the next Berlin—they see the same combination of Art Nouveau and shiny new architecture, overhear the same mix of European languages, frequent the same types of art spaces, find the same brand of oat milk in their flat whites. But they can’t recapture the old spark. They are bored.

They then leave for an extended vacation in Sicily, where they discover authenticity and find it wanting: “The fishing villages had no fishermen in them, and the little bars around the main piazza weren’t patronized by old people playing cards but by groups of teenagers with ripped bodies and blaring mopeds…. The restaurants all had laminated menus with photos of the dishes.” They return to Berlin, where things have slowed down. All-nighters at Berghain are supplanted by picturesque lunches with natural wine and local IPAs. The job that once felt like a natural extension of their passions has become empty. Their friend group starts to diminish; their loose ties to their new country mean that an eviction notice or pregnancy are enough to send someone back home. Anna and Tom realize that the shabby-chic Berlin they moved to is gone. A more moneyed class—mostly from America, working in tech or some other vaporous industry—has moved into the fish-tank new builds and renovations, with curtainless glass windows revealing gleaming kitchen islands and abstract art.

The novel wraps up quickly. Anna and Tom are now approaching their mid-30s. It’s possible to imagine a better-adjusted couple assessing the situation and either moving back home or solidifying their place in Berlin, maybe even making some German friends. It’s not true that nothing else exists besides life as a member of the international laptop class, but all told there are many worse gigs. There’s a healthy version of settling. Anna and Tom choose neither path. A fluke accident and an inherited windfall move the couple to the Mediterranean coast. They finally have an opportunity to make full use of their branding experience, design skills, and knowing taste. Their new life is a social media success, where it of course appears perfect. One gets the sense that things won’t end well for them. Personally, I’d have just gotten a dog.