Is Good Taste a Trap?

The interest that sensation is deceptive oregon distracting haunts seemingly each communicative successful which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders however she failed to announcement her husband’s unhappiness, and asks however helium mightiness person failed to announcement it for himself. “I thought I was blessed but I’m not,” helium tells her. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” It’s a brutal mode to permission a marriage. And yet aboriginal a person tells Burden that the divorcement has liberated her existent personality, revealing idiosyncratic who is “lighter, easier, much relaxed. . . . You look to beryllium letting spell of a bigger acceptable of taste standards, of immoderate benignant of externally imposed thought of who you should be.” Living tastefully requires making galore small, bully decisions, and doing this successfully tin springiness you the sensation of heading successful the close direction. But the hazard of crafting a picture-perfect beingness is that you’ll suffer show of the large picture.

Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s caller “Perfection,” are “creative professionals” surviving arsenic expats successful Berlin. “Their nonstop titles varied depending connected the job,” Latronico writes. “Web developer, graphic designer, online marque strategist”—the bottommost enactment is that they make “differences.” When a caller boutique edifice opens, it needs to pass its uniqueness wrong the crowded scenery of taste. Anna and Tom execute this done infinitesimal shifts to the colour palette, oregon the nuanced exertion of fonts. “Their benignant was simple, intimate, successful keeping with an aesthetic that was starting to beryllium seen each implicit the world,” Latronico explains—a “casual coolness” acquainted from “every gourmet burger associated and performance poster.”

The couple’s bully sensation flows from their screens into the carnal world, and past backmost into their screens. On societal media, they spot an endless grid of airy apartments filled with “stunning plants successful bay windows, connected plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.” Soon, their flat is simply a greenhouse, too—“Plants appeared retired of nowhere, a afloat developed skill,” Latronico writes—and this enriches the photographs that they post, erstwhile they database their flat online, truthful that tourists tin rent it. Similarly, aft years of making the aforesaid sandwiches and spaghetti sauce, they go superior cooks, on with everyone else. Dinners astatine friends’ houses abruptly impact “elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit,” and each people is “accompanied by a chorus of compliments and method remarks.” Latronico notes that “their involvement hadn’t been planted by sly marketers, but appeared arsenic if by osmosis, arsenic they observed the small differences each astir them.” As members of a tasteful generation, “they were each learning together.”

Collecting vinyl, clubbing astatine Berghain, contemplating polyamory—this is cool. But Anna and Tom don’t consciousness free. They’re trapped successful the sensation matrix that they’ve helped construct. It was their ain bully taste, aft all, that primitively compelled them to fly their provincial location municipality for Berlin; erstwhile newer incoming cool-hunters propulsion up the outgo of surviving successful the city, it’s sensation that nudges them toward Lisbon (“the caller Berlin”), wherever they anticipation to repetition the cycle. The occupation is that information moves faster than they do. When dinner-party pictures tin instantaneously question “to the different extremity of the planet, bouncing on successful debased Earth orbit oregon speeding crossed water ridges,” meaningful distinctions can’t last. In Lisbon, “it was each different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was besides someway each the same.”

There’s thing science-fictional astir “Perfection,” and yet it’s an close relationship of however modern sensation makes itself felt. Taste is simply a planetary force, driving migrations, shifting investments, and dividing america into groups and tribes. Because it’s been truthful heavy technologized, it present feels unitary, omnipresent—like a question that sweeps america up but ne'er breaks. Philosophers picture the “problem of costly tastes”; today’s luxuries go tomorrow’s necessities. For Anna and Tom, that dynamic leads to exile. Driven retired of the spot they’re from, they’re priced retired of astir places they mightiness privation to go, and can’t beryllium contented successful the ones they tin afford. By the closing enactment of the novel, though their sensation is everywhere, they’re citizens of nowhere.