BookBrowse Reviews Good Girl by Aria Aber

BookBrowse:

This blistering debut novel from an award-winning poet sees the daughter of Afghan refugees come of age in Berlin's underground club scene.

Only a few paragraphs into Aria Aber's Good Girl, the sentences begin to vibrate with the bass-heavy techno that propels this formidable debut forward. The narrator, Nila, daughter of Afghan doctors forced by war to flee Kabul, has just finished boarding school in the German countryside and returns to Berlin "ravaged by the hunger to ruin [her] life." Stifled by her father's resentment at his refugee status and scarred by the death of her mother, she feels an overwhelming urge to throw herself into a world of easy-come drugs and sudden, wordless sex. Luckily, the German capital's legendary clubs are happy to oblige.

Nila starts spending her nights at The Bunker, a converted heating plant in the desolate sprawl of the city's old communist East. The club's ethos is "come as you are," as long as you come as the infamously authoritarian bouncers demand you be. That means a lot of black leather, fishnet—or simply nothing at all. In the haze of one drug-fueled evening, Nila stumbles across Marlowe, a handsome American writer in his 30s living off the fame of a hit novel published in his youth. Nila is 18 and Marlowe has a girlfriend. But this is Berlin: no time for bourgeois morality. One crooked smile from the has-been author and Nila soon finds herself in a predictable series of interlocking love triangles.

The hook-up starts ill-advisedly and deteriorates from there. This central axis of the novel is in many ways its weakest aspect. Remove the prodigious drug use and occasional sadomasochism and you'll find Nila and Marlowe follow all the familiar contours of any doomed teenage romance. (After all—and to the surprise of no one—Marlowe turns out to be a teenager trapped inside a 36-year-old's body.) What's more, the couple and their entourage exude all the noxious over-seriousness of over-educated youth. They describe things as "Deleuzian," have dogs named for prominent Soviets. Nila's past-tense narration comes from an ostensibly older and wiser place, but she's clearly kept her penchant for pretension. At one point she tells the reader how she is "troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories"; the reader, in turn, may be troubled by the complete earnestness with which she says this.

The novel is far more interesting and Aber's writing skills far more affecting when trained on Nila's reckoning with her identity. Never having visited the country of her parents' birth, she senses a chasm between herself and them; but although born and raised in Germany, she knows too that she'll always be taken for an auslander—a foreigner from someplace or other. Growing up in a post-9/11 world, with daily life punctuated by spasms of neo-Nazi violence against immigrants with "a southern look," Nila consciously snips off her Afghan roots in public. Sometimes she tells her friends she's Italian; other times, Colombian or Greek. The wounds of this internal exile cut deep, and Aber traces their emotional scars with heart-breaking intensity.

Good Girl may not be a flawless debut, but it has all the best qualities and the most endearing flaws of the city in which it was born: fierce, self-important, wild, and fearless. Aber, who started her literary career as a poet, isn't afraid to try her hand at a daring and arresting image; indeed, she appears afraid of very little. She captures brilliantly the agony and the ecstasy playing out on every Berlin street corner, as well as the feverish search for meaning—or, failing that, just feeling—that drives Nila to the city's "ghetto-heart." This is a blistering, pulsating coming-of-age story, powerfully written by an author who knows how to make her mark.

This review first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.