What it means to be good – or not – is the infected wound at the heart of Aria Aber’s debut novel, The Good Girl. The narrator is a hapless young woman named Neela Haddadi, and the story she tells sounds like a howl of despair turned into the key of poetic retrospection. Indeed, the fact that this terrible story recalls the events of more than a decade ago gives the only certainty that the narrator survived her teenage years.
Neela’s Afghan mother gave birth to her in Berlin during a burst of international optimism when the wall came down. But her district has already become an ulcer of xenophobia in the united city. “I was born in the heart of the ghetto,” says Nila, “a little wide-eyed rat.” She is quickly developing the feeling that she is a stick that is used to beat catastrophic geopolitics – in particular, the arrogance of Russia and America in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires”.
The Good Girl is never overtly political, but the fabric of the story constantly touches the barbed wire of European isolationism. Although the events take place several years ago, the inhospitable culture that Aber describes presages the past success of the downfall of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing party that advocates mass deportation of immigrants. And, of course, such animosity is also a strength of the new US administration. Just last month, Trump trumpeter Elon Musk told his 210 million followers on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.” American readers who want to hear the mixed frustration and despair of an alienated generation will find The Good Girl a heartbreaking cry.
Aber’s writing is imbued with the knowledge of lived experience: like her protagonist, she was born in Germany, and her parents were also immigrants from Afghanistan. The neo-Nazi acts of intimidation and terror she describes in The Good Girl areunfortunately, elements of recent history, not fiction.
Before the beginning of the novel, Nila’s parents were doctors in Kabul. They fled with false documents to find themselves without documents or work in the West. Neela’s birth delayed their deportation until they were granted citizenship in Germany, but unlike other immigrant families, her family “missed the fast, red-hot train to upward mobility.” They were stuck in a 14-story building littered with needles and marked with swastikas. There are so many of them abhorrent The bugs are crawling through these pages that every copy of Good Girl should come with a can of Raid.
After many years of this embittered her mother died when Neela was 16. Her father, a Marxist who once dreamed of a better world, continues dirty an apartment filled with trash and rage. And so the “Good Girl” begins.
Although Neela is impressively intelligent, she cannot find solace at school or at home. To avoid the pity or suspicion of others, she tells everyone that her family is from Greece. Meanwhile, her well-educated father may have abandoned the strict demands of Islam, but he projects all the shame that clings to liberated young women. Trapped in this crucible of rage and deceitNeela drifts further and further away from home, feeling “devastated by the hunger” that is destroying her life. Naturally, life tends to obey.
Good Girl focuses on a particularly harrowing year when Neely turns 19. While studying philosophy at Humboldt University, she spends most of her time in Berlin’s “glittering, destructive underworld” listening to loud techno. Her fashionable friends take “David Foster Wallace too seriously and deodorant not seriously enough.” Her father is too lost in his grief to do anything but flash periodically in fits of anger.
One evening in a rough bar known as the Bunker, Neela sees the American writer Marlowe Woods. He’s a terrible kid who’s still riding the sliver of fame his one published book brought him. Claiming that “being unemployed is the most radical thing you can do,” Marlow hangs dives, gives away speed, and cheats on his long-suffering girlfriend. At 36, he’s a manipulative, pompous creep in a tattered leather jacket – he’s also a brilliant satire of a certain kind of emasculated literary celebrity who’s still riding the fumes of a few good reviews in publications no one actually reads.
Nila says: “I was almost sick from the train.” I feel nauseous.
The Good Girl is a brooding, claustrophobic tale of alienation and erotic obsession, but plot in the traditional sense is not Aber’s priority. It’s more of a ramble than a trip. Neela swallows an amazing smorgasbord of pills. Narcotic oblivion provides moments of relief from a life that Neela can barely tolerate. Despite hoping to become a photographer, she makes a series of disastrous decisions that hinder her academic and professional goals. Her father screams, seems to be screaming again. And so the year of her confusion with Marlowe unfolds as a series of dark moments, including several sex scenes so depressing they could have been used in a school seminar on abstinence.
Marlowe is a drug addict and a fool who will never offer her the freedom or validation she craves. Waiting several hundred pages for Neela to understand is painful at first, then exasperating. By the time a friend tells her, “All you’re doing is going around in circles,” we’ve already spun the diagnosis.
Not that Aber’s prose isn’t spellbinding. Like Joseph Conrad, she is an articulate English stylist who writes in her third language. Open Good Girl to any page and you’re immediately arrested by the stunning beauty of her work and the way desire pushes at the seams of despair.
In her debut poetry collection Hard Damage (2019), Aber writes: “If you become a daughter, you are forced to live a double life. You will become a fraud: a good girl who received X degrees, serves tea to her parents, dances at weddings, sends money home; and a girl who dances on tables, exchanges kisses with strangers, drinks wine, etc.’
A novel and a collection of poetry are, of course, different creatures with their own particular strengths, but in both prose and verse, Abert touches the heart of a young woman trying to find herself in the heat of conflicting cultures.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post. He is the book critic for CBS Sunday Morning.