The Stuff of Fiction, FT Magazine, September 2025
Essay on depictions of shopping in literature, for the FT Weekend Magazine.
Extract:
The protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection are “embarrassed” by how much time they spend on social media. “They would find themselves utterly mesmerised by the apartment, kale salad or kitten of someone living two blocks or two continents away,” he writes. “It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel-hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people.” The fact that the book emerged as the read of the summer — a must-have accessory on social media — brought a final encore of humour and irony to Latronico’s project, cementing the relevance of his premise, which is that we are all addicted to performing and consuming. Perfection tracks, almost anthropologically, the fraught contemporary habit of displaying life through social media, using images of ourselves, our spaces and our “curated” purchases, to convey style, self-knowledge and belonging.
The images of Perfection shared on Instagram by readers could have been scenes from the book itself, in which the 40-year-old Italian captures, with a thoroughness that is both cruel and tender — a sign of his own complicity — the clichés of millennial “good taste”: the carefully designed yet generic Airbnbs, the well-dressed expat “creatives” wafting around Berlin (Latronico’s home city for a number of years), the brands with identikit sans-serif fonts, the vintage clothes, the house plants, the natural wines, the takeaway coffees. Over the past few months, it seemed that every time I scrolled the app, there was the book, its blue cover popping against a striped beach towel. There was the book in a café next to a voluptuous pastry, or barely thumbed, laid on a mid-century coffee table. The codes of all these images were recognisable: each a trope, restaged as a kind of ritual, obeying existing templates to convey understanding and participation: the aesthetics of a tasteful, well-spent summer. This is exactly what Perfection is about. “They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them,” Latronico writes.
Perfection, which was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, became one of the fastest selling fiction titles its publisher Fitzcarraldo has ever released. It sits somewhere between a homage to, and a reworking of, Georges Perec’s 1965 debut novel Things: A Story of the Sixties. Latronico’s take is skilled and sharp: the pleasure of a great song covered in a way that is both faithful and unexpected. Both books describe couples — the Paris-based Sylvie and Jerôme in Perec’s, Berlin’s Anna and Tom in Latronico’s. Both pairs are insecure and hungry, fulfilling an old obsession of mine relating to books that deal with the sensations of shopping: works about people buying things, and wanting to buy things, and defining themselves by what they have bought.
Perfection and Things, with their focuses on the gluts of the age — images, information, products — also bring to mind the first great shopping novel: Émile Zola’s 1883 Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), which offers a fictional account of life inside a modern department store. It draws heavily on the real story of Paris’s innovative Le Bon Marché, which unites a multitude of products under one roof. Characters grapple with the freedom, the excess, the shock of the new: “Has anyone ever seen such a thing? A draper’s shop which sold everything! Just a big bazaar! And a fine staff too: a lot of dandies who pushed things about like porters at a railway station, who treated the goods and the customers like parcels, dropping their employer or being dropped by him at a moment’s notice. No affection, no manners, no art!”
In Things, Sylvie and Jerôme dream of London, of English clothes, of “the great staircase of footwear leading from Churches to Westons, from Westons to Buntings and from Buntings to Lobbs”. The day they discover the flea market is “one of the most important days of their lives”. For Anna and Tom, all hobbies, including cooking, are defined by their potential for consumption and photogenic content: “Their preferred knives were first ceramic, then rusty Vietnamese steel, then forged stainless steel.”
We do not hear the couples in Things or Perfection speak, instead we live inside the humming of their lust: “Beside them, all around them, all the fallacious but nonetheless glowing offerings of antique-dealers, delicatessens and stationers,” Perec writes. “The whole of Paris was a perpetual temptation. They burned with desire to give in to it, passionately, straight away and for ever.” Wanting is exhausting, Perec tells us: “The vastness of their desires paralysed them.” The yearning, for possessions, for belonging, for meaning, is never sated, no matter what is experienced or acquired.
This shopping-induced blend of nerves and longing, the sense of something better, just around the corner, is something we all experience, whether we are browsing the internet, falling apart under the weight of our own aspiration in the changing room of an overpriced shop, or wasting an hour of the time that we should have spent writing this article scrolling identical cat litter trays on Amazon. So vast are the objects of Sylvie and Jerôme’s attention — “they would become passionate about a suitcase” — that their lives vibrate with anxious longing: they cannot rest, relax, cannot shake off the feeling of alertness. They are “tense, avid, almost jealous”. It’s not hard to see why Latronico read Perec’s book and felt it ripe for revival.
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In Alphabetical Diaries Sheila Heti — a writer who has often explored our relationship to possessions, such as in the 2014 book Women in Clothes — writes, “a book [is] like a shopping mart, all the selections”. Here, she could be talking about the experiences of both writer and reader. To write is to pluck from the shelves of experience and memory. And to read is to engage with the process of invention that occurs when shopping: to imagine, to fantasise, to conjure new realities, companions or identities for ourselves. The feeling of yearning that comes when we enter a shop is not unlike that which we have when we fall in love with a book — it is the ache to assume a different life, to be someone else entirely.
To read a book about shopping is therefore something of a meta experience, a chance to see the characters partake in their own characterisation: to watch them reveal their images of themselves, to show the process of their stylisation. There’s a famous scene in Sex and the City — the ultimate shopping TV show — when Carrie Bradshaw tells her terrible novelist boyfriend Jack Berger that his protagonist, a supposedly fashionable New York woman, would never think of wearing a scrunchie. He has shopped wrongly on the character’s behalf, rendering her unbelievable.
Annie Ernaux — sometimes dubbed the Queen of the Supermarket by boresome critics, due to her interest in the everyday spaces where life happens, from malls to metro cars — is a great chronicler of the emotions of shopping, the way a garment or cut of meat can fizz with potential, with the promise of making us “right”. In The Years, she tracks the possessions and adverts that defined her life, promising modernity, from her birth in 1940 onwards: “Bic pens, shampoo in cartons, Bulgomme bubble gum, Gerflex, Tampax, and creams to remove unwanted hair, Gilac plastics, Dacron, neon, tubes, hazelnut milk chocolate, the Solex motorbike, chlorophyll toothpaste.”
In Ernaux’s Exteriors, we see couples performing status at the butcher, teenagers fighting for a semblance of independence on the concrete plazas of the shopping mall. Exteriors is a visual diary, where Ernaux tries to observe life in her hometown of Cergy-Pontoise with the distance of a photographer. But occasionally, she creeps into frame. One such moment happens on walking through a shopping centre, when the feelings of desire overwhelm her ability to observe others: “The winter sales have already begun. Although I only came here to buy coffee, after a few minutes, I find myself longing for coats, blouses, handbags; in other words, I see myself dressed in a twirling succession of coats and blouses. Black coats, for instance, despite the fact that I already have a black car coat. (But it’s not the same, it’s never the same; tiny differences between the items we crave and the ones we own: the collar, the length, the material, etc.) I succumb to a strange condition in which I want all sorts of clothes for myself, regardless of shape or colour, in which I am seized with an overriding compulsion to buy a coat or a handbag. Once I am outside, this longing subsides.”
Her description captures the ferocity of shopping-induced cravings: the sensation that suddenly everything we currently own is wrong, that we ourselves are wrong. Ernaux’s text is part of a history of France-focused texts that explore, as Ernaux puts it, how the “violence and shame inherent in society” can be found within the movements and habits of shoppers. Walter Benjamin’s long and unfinished The Arcades Project, written between 1927 and his death in 1940, tracks the rise of consumerism across Paris, and offers, like Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, a study of the emergence of department stores: the precursors to Harrods and Selfridges and, later, the Net-a-Porters and even Amazons of today.
Fittingly, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, written in 1939, is set in Paris and sees her protagonist, a middle-aged Englishwoman, punctuate her misery with brief, obsessive hankerings — for better clothes, better hair, a better life. Rhys’s characters are usually miserable, broken, demeaned. Possessions, and drink, are presented as offering a brief and empty reprieve, a flash of hope: “Tomorrow I’ll be pretty again, tomorrow I’ll be happy again, tomorrow, tomorrow.”
Good Morning, Midnight can be read in relation to Perfection and Things as, like both novels, it begins with a description of a room: a generic, Parisian hotel bedroom where Sasha Jansen — herself a former shop girl — finds herself alone, and miserable. Jansen thinks about dyeing her hair blonde (she can’t recall where the decent Paris hairdresser is based, but if she goes to the fancy department store Galeries Lafayette, “I can find my way there”), she cries in bars, she sets out to “buy scent, buy lipstick, buy things costing fcs. 6.25 and fcs. 19.50, buy anything cheap. Just the sensation of spending, that’s the point.” We see her shop for books: “I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes — a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it.” She boasts of her plans: “I am over here for two weeks to buy a lot of clothes to startle my friends — my many friends.”
Of course, we all know how these things end. We have all got the garment home, and away from the flattering light of the changing room and stream of comforting lies from a sales assistant and realised that we are not changed after all: that we are the same person we always were, just with less money in our account and more clutter in our wardrobe. The best shopping novels — be it Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, or even Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which begins with Clarissa Dalloway on Bond Street, looking in the window of a glove shop and feeling distant from her daughter, who cares “not a straw” for shopping — capture both the thrills and the emptiness of the façade, the beckoning lights of the stores, the veneer of taste and elegance. A noticeable exception here is Paul Gallico’s 1958 feel-good classic Flowers for Mrs Harris, where the pursuit of a garment — a Dior gown — is presented not as a mask to emptiness, but a journey to profound self-discovery.
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Like the writer herself, the women Joan Didion chronicles are often depressed and well-dressed. Didion was raised on shopping. “I have difficulty now imagining a childhood in which a man named Jere Strizek, the developer of Town and Country Village Outside Sacramento (143,000 square feet gross floor area, 68 stores, 1000 parking spaces . . . ) could materialize as role model, but I had such a childhood, just after World War II, in Sacramento,” she writes in her essay On the Mall, first published in Esquire in December 1975. At 12, she imagined Strizek, “a kind of frontiersman, a romantic and revolutionary spirit”. Her misguided faith is not unlike the feeling Tom and Anna have, in Perfection, that, as freelance “creatives”, able to work nomadically and thus eschew the routines, commutes and offices of their parents’ generations, they must be, despite their constant sway between anxiety and ennui, living well and freely.
Later, Didion took a University of California extension course, by correspondence, in shopping-centre theory. She did this while working at Vogue. “I remember sitting on the cool floor in Irving Penn’s studio and reading, in The Community Builders Handbook, advice from James B. Douglas on shopping-center financing,” she writes. “My ‘real’ life was to sit in this office and describe life as it was lived in Djakarta and Caneel Bay and in the great châteaux of the Loire Valley, but my dream life was to put together a Class-A regional shopping center with three full-line department stores as major tenants.” To her, this was the ideal way to fund a life writing fiction — far less “taxing”, she says, than a job at Vogue.
As always, in this essay Didion is moved by society’s anxieties and the futile quest for control: to her the intrigue of the shopping centre comes in its ability to manipulate and exert power, the way stores are arranged to direct and steady a troubled mind. Didion describes the experience of shopping as somewhere between lobotomising and uplifting. One is devoid of true agency, calmed by the sense of order and promise within the decadence. Didion recalls visiting Ala Moana, in Honolulu — for a time, the largest shopping mall in the United States — to buy a newspaper. On finding it is not in stock, she sits for a while, eating caramel corn, then buys “two straw hats at Liberty House, four bottles of nail enamel at Woolworth’s, and a toaster, on sale at Sears”. Her shopping centre studies have informed her that these are categorised as “impulse purchases”: “but the impulse here was obscure. I do not wear hats, nor do I like caramel corn. I do not use nail enamel. Yet flying back across the Pacific I regretted only the toaster.” Reading her I felt I understood the exact feeling.