Stories with two lead characters tend to be stories about mirrors, about the ways we reflect the best and worst in each other, how what at first seem like differences are actually echoes. In that regard, Irene Graziosi’s debut novel, The Other Profile, is part of a long tradition that extends from Jeckyl and Hyde to Kirk and Khan. But the novel is also more of the moment: Its narrator, Maia, is a bright but wayward 20-something Italian woman who fails upward into a job assisting Gloria, a social media influencer. Gloria, we learn, has two million followers, has appeared in a couple of movies, and has, somehow, sold 200,000 copies of a book of poems. The one example of her verse is insipid even by instapoet standards. (“You are like Christmas / I wait for you all year,” etc.) Maia by turns is bemused by and infuriated at the unfairness of this dynamic.
The question Graziosi wants to pose across the novel is: Should she be? Maia spends much of the book mocking a culture that’s shallow and hypocritical, posturing as caring about emotional wellness and feminist empowerment so long as the skin cream sells. There’s nothing new in that hypocrisy, though Graziosi does, entertainingly, throw some sharp elbows at the patriarchy running the show: “The brands now wheel her out for any campaign to promote feminism, usually ideated by middle-aged men who grope the interns.” But underneath Maia’s familiar cynicism, the strength of The Other Profile is evident in how it cannily conveys the ways that Maia — and all of us — are implicated in this dynamic, how she’s only half-interested in wriggling out of it, and how escape may be impossible. As a satire of influencer culture it’s old-hat, but as a character study it has bite.
Maia initially enters Gloria’s orbit because she’s running away from other things. She’s broke, more or less, having dropped out of college and landed a job as a waitress in Milan; on the side, she trades nude selfies with one barfly for weed. She’s hung on to a boyfriend, Filippo, an academic, but the depth of their affection is questionable and he’s largely absent anyway. She keeps her family at arm’s length. Her sister, Eva, has died two years earlier, but she puts on a brave face about it: “I felt absolutely no pain when Eva died, and I still don’t.” Subsumed in that much anomie, working for Gloria is a clear step up.
When Maia lands the job as Gloria’s “image consultant” — writing captions for her Instagram posts, basically — she initially thinks she’s been assigned a Pygmalion project. (It’s Bizarro-world Ferrante: My Not-So-Brilliant Friend.) Gloria is invited into high culture circles that are foreign to her, ones Maia can bluff through thanks to her stints accompanying Filippo to receptions and art exhibitions, not to mention her own native intelligence. (When she gives herself credit for it, that is; Lucy Rand’s translation captures Maia’s snark but also a fragility lurking underneath.) “You have to give her a personality,” Gloria’s manager tells her. “Gloria has no form, except that of whoever is beside her in any given moment. So right now, she has yours.”
But a Pygmalion story would imply that Gloria requires improvement, and in time, Maia recognizes that Gloria’s parasitical, empty-headed demeanor is a feature, not a bug. A rigid personality would only get in the way of the need to fluidly shift loyalties from brand to brand; education would only make her wonder if she has any business writing poems and judging literary prizes. The agent charges Maia with making sure that Gloria doesn’t say anything stupid, but she handles that job well enough on her own. To be silent and attractive, for her, is no difficult feat, and all Maia needs to do is hang back and let her do it.
So who, then, is being parasitical and empty-headed? Graziosi deliberately frames Maia as stuck between the two poles of conventional intellectual achievement (Filippo) and brainless popularity-chasing (Gloria). But everybody, Graziosi suggests, is stuck in a game of surfaces and postures that are meant to grease the wheels of the patriarchy. “I am contorting myself into what a man wants,” Maia concedes, after having cycled through months of push-and-pull with Gloria. “I have never felt so powerful; I have never been less so.”
Avoiding this fate, for Graziosi, isn’t so much a function of feminism, which she suggests has been so consumed by capitalism and branding to have become its own empty buzzword. (“I used to call myself a feminist,” Graziosi told an audience at the Turin International Book Fair in 2022. “Now I don’t, because most words no longer make sense.”) But release might come through a different kind of self-awareness, of acknowledgment of how the algorithm manipulates; that escape hatch is symbolized by Maia’s slow-growing willingness to drop her mask when it comes to her sister’s death.
But what good is self-actualization these days if nobody gets to see how self-actualized you are? Maia’s transformation in the novel is appealingly imperfect because she can’t entirely elude society’s demand that we put our lives on display — and, moreover, perform “authenticity” for the algorithm’s sake. “Who am I?” she fumes toward the novel’s end, as the depth of her feelings of entrapment reach their climax. “You can’t define yourself alone; you don’t exist if nobody sees you.” In the opening pages of the novel, that line would register as very Maia-esque snark. By the end, it reads as resignation.
Graziosi’s means of dramatizing this is a bit hacky, a dramatic attempt to smash it all in a fit of intoxication; heroism doesn’t happen on a bender. But it does underscore Graziosi’s sense that recovering our humanity, preserving it, keeping it away from the marketplace, can move us to desperate behavior. Desperate, because there’s so much clouding our vision, encouraging us to avoid conducting a search for ourselves. But we’re in there, somewhere, probably.
[Published by Europa Editions on February 6, 2024, 224 pages, $27.00 US hardcover.]