‘Good Girl’ pulses with rage, joy, violence and pleasure

A striking portrait of two artists in love anchors a key scene in Aria Aber’s electrifying debut novel, Good Girl. Nila, its young, queer Afghan protagonist, is navigating increasingly uncomfortable small talk at an obnoxious fundraiser in 2010s Berlin, when she is compelled by a photograph on the wall. The photo features lovers Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, two major figures of the surrealist movement, entwined in an intimate embrace. Nila, an aspiring photographer at 19, is fascinated by the frank body language of both artists in the image: “Desire rose from it like a lawful act—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.” 

In addition to attracting her photographer’s eye, the image of Carrington and Ernst presents Nila with a reflection of her own life, and her own passions. When the two artists met and fell in love in 1937, Ernst was 26 years older than Carrington, who was barely out of her teens at the time; the two maintained a tumultuous relationship for years afterward. Nila herself is in the midst of a love affair with Marlowe, a white American writer who is 18 years her senior. Their relationship has been riddled with tension and power imbalance from the start, but in addition to their sexual attraction and shared love of amphetamines and techno clubs, Nila feels a strong connection to Marlowe and his dedication to living an artistic life. She is seduced by his belief in her artistic ability—approval that she is unable to get from her own family, in which any pursuit of pleasure and desire, especially by girls, is treated as dangerous.

Nila has grown up in a council block in Gropiusstadt, in Berlin’s Neukölln borough, with her parents, Afghan refugees who fled their middle-class life in Kabul to escape the Afghan civil war of the early 1990s. She feels trapped by and ashamed of her neighbourhood, and spends the novel trying to get as far away from it as she can. She is “repulsed” by the familiar faces of the boys at the local shisha bar who look like her and are “just as hungry for joy and violence” as she is, and by the men of the community who act as though they care about her but who are quick to call her a whore and report her to her parents for her short skirts. She resents her bedroom in the family apartment, “a suffocating box with a tiny window [and] pink sheets,” and avoids ever letting friends or lovers see the building, with its silverfish and rats. She sneaks away at every chance to snort speed and party with her crew of friends at clubs like “the Bunker,” which is their nickname for Berghain, Berlin’s most famous after-hours techno club. Young and already full of grief and hunger, she yearns for the anonymous oblivion of the club: “darkness was an authority to which I submitted.”

Good Girl is a stunning first novel: it pulses with rage and joy, violence and pleasure. Aber writes Berlin with the clear gaze of someone who grew up there, as she did: she is just as able to write the elegiac highs of a day-long stint in the Bunker as to detail the unchecked violence of white Berliners toward immigrants and refugees—implicating both self-avowed fascists and those who stand by and downplay racist attacks and rhetoric. Her prose is propulsive, like the dance floors she writes so well, shifting in tone and rhythm according to Nila’s increasingly polarized moods. Aber is also an award-winning poet, whose debut collection, Hard Damage, is similarly concerned with recording Afghan history and diaspora, questioning 

Western notions of nation and citizenship, and writing a world of grime and beauty. If this makes Good Girl a poet’s novel, it certainly doesn’t conform to the stereotype of a lushly written book with abundant internal reflection and no narrative—instead, it is both lushly written and tightly, tensely plotted. Aber’s characters, of which there are many, are all fully formed, difficult and contradictory. They collide with one another, full of love and anger, cowardice and ambition—they set each other off in unpredictable ways, their relationships forming and breaking against a backdrop of drugs, parties, sex, art-making, violence—both political and familial—and Berlin’s own mottled history. Throughout, questions pulse: Who gets to pursue their desires? And for whom is pleasure allowed?

At the novel’s outset, Nila, who is about to turn 19, is still reeling from the sudden death of her mother two summers ago. She is at loose ends, having returned from the prestigious boarding school that her parents managed to send her to on scholarship. Back at home, berated for partying by her grief-shrunken father, she longs for freedom. Increasingly distant from her father and relatives, longing to go to art school but unable to afford it, Nila is primed to enter into a tumultuous relationship with the charismatic Marlowe, whom she meets at the Bunker, along with his younger Marxist girlfriend Doreen and a crew of partiers. Marlowe toys with both younger women, pitting them against each other, before choosing a relationship with Nila. The couple bonds through shared pain: Marlowe also lost his mother when he was sixteen, back in California, and this loss is the subject of the book that made him successful. Marlowe is passionate and unpredictable and, it becomes clear, dangerously controlling. “I decide when I fuck you,” he tells her, keeping her anxious and turned on. One day, in a cranky mood, he throws a ceramic bowl at her, then apologizes profusely. The never-ending supply of speed, the frequent stints inside the Bunker, the sleep-deprived bouts of sex are thrilling for Nila but also keep her on edge, malleable and uncertain. Artists are bad people, Marlowe tells her, before launching into an anecdote about leaving a former girlfriend suddenly on a beach with no explanation and moving to Europe. But Nila is different from other girls, he says, to her delight. “You are the one,” he tells her, even as his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, especially when she does or says things that contradict or undermine him. 

Nila has only ever loved one person before: Setareh, another Afghan girl, who broke her heart after several months of heady dating in secret as teenagers. Nila’s memories of the two of them together, flirting and then becoming more intimate, are a heartbreaking counterpoint to her relationship with Marlowe. Together, the girls are tender, urgent, vulnerable: “There was a formality to our movements as we undressed, even here. We touched each other timidly, her hand moving up my thigh. Then anguish followed insecurity, and I turned into a kind of animal, biting her neck.” 

Now, though, Nila spends all her time with this white man, with whom she does not feel comfortable sharing her Afghan identity. She tells him, and everyone she knows from boarding school and in the clubs, that she is Greek. As a child, after 9/11, she learned to hide that she and her family are Afghan, that they are Muslim, though her parents were always fairly secular. Setareh is one of the only people outside of her family whom she gets close to, who knows her as Afghan. But “people like us” can’t date in the open, Setareh tells her, before they break up. Setareh says she can’t let herself date women until her parents are both dead. 

Like Setareh, Nila cannot speak of her queerness to her family. She is constantly afraid of running into various uncles during nights out—many of them are cab drivers, whose cars she could accidentally get into, who would report on her to her father. In her family, which is full of headstrong women, the female desire for sex and liberty is deemed an “illness.” This is not to say that Nila’s family is overly conservative. Her mother once belonged to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Nila’s parents “wanted women to wear their hair uncovered, to have political opinions and a taste in music, and to go to college,” but still required her to adhere to the rules of patriarchy. “You had to be a dokhtare khub, a good girl, in order not to turn into a dokhtare kharab, a broken, bad, ruined girl.” Marlowe unwittingly echoing the refrains of her family, telling her she’ll be “spoiled” later; they have so much speed-fuelled sex, he says, that if she sleeps with other people after him, it will never be as good. Later, he weaponizes her bisexuality, pressuring her to have a threesome with him—she can pick the girl. Having fled the strictness and grief of her family unit, Nila finds herself in another bind: the threat of being a ruined girl is replaced with the threat of being a spoiled one. She is free to party for days on end, to lose herself in the oblivion of techno, but tied to a man whose actions betray very little care for her safety, and a lack of respect for her agency, like the men she grew up around.

“There are two things that necessitate violence: overthrowing capitalism, and love,” proclaims Doreen, the self-professed Marxist-Leninist and the most politically engaged of the Bunker crew. The confusion over when violence is necessary, and when it is intolerable permeates Nila’s life. Aber does the delicate work of parsing the violence that Nila experiences at the hands of her parents, and other Afghan community members, versus the violence that she and everyone in her neighbourhood must fear from Germans and other white Europeans who want them dead or deported. These violences are linked, Aber shows us. Often, the violence of control that occurs within Nila’s domestic life is fuelled by the fear of violence that could be visited on her from the outside. When a group of white terrorists begin murdering Arab, Afghan and other civilians who are assumed to be Muslim, including men in her own neighbourhood, Nila is weighed down by conflicting currents of pain: these men who are being targeted are “men like my father and uncles, men who I too had hated, men whose faces were so easy to hate.” She has always resented the patriarchal views and behaviours of the men in her family and their community, and now that they are being killed, “their deaths ran in seams underneath my own life, like the waterways underneath a city.”

Nila’s own mode of self-protection, which is to deny that she is Afghan, has resulted in what Nila calls her “own exile.” This distance from her family and from herself begins to wear on her, resulting in frightening periods of disassociation. On an ill-fated trip to Italy with Marlowe, she has an intense depersonalized episode while looking at the sea. “My entire life I danced on the outside, looking in. I saw a cliff and I became the cliff. A part of me was gone.” For the past few years, she has sought out her own freedom through going dancing and having sex, but also through photography. She has discovered that “to take a picture [is] to control the narrative,” and loves the work of Nan Goldin, “photos that looked as if torn right out of life.” One can’t help but hear the violence in that phrasing—the rupture that is required for the image, the tear and the resulting hole. 

Amidst the increasing turbulence of her relationship, and of Berlin itself, Nila must learn to undo some of the erasure she has protected herself with, to control the narrative not just when she is taking photos but also when she can’t risk staying hidden behind a camera any longer. Good Girl is a novel that thrums with life, even as it sits so closely to death. Aber’s Berlin is fickle—a city of unlimited drugs, parties and pleasure, and of racial violence, repression and inertia. This is a coming-of-age story that surprises and disarms at every turn.