Good Girl (2025)

Why this one?

I’m finally getting around to checking out a few of the books on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, before I read the shortlist in full when it’s announced. I chose this one purely based on its description.

Aria Aber (1991- ; active 2019- ) was born in Münster, Germany to parents who were Afghan refugees. She studied English Literature at Goldsmiths, London, and later completed an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Remaining in academia and the US, she began publishing poetry, and her first collection, Hard Damage, was published in 2019. She is now an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont and lives between Vermont and Brooklyn. Good Girl is her debut novel.

Thoughts, etc.

Good Girl centres on Nila, a 19-year-old student of Afghan refugees living in Berlin in what seems to be around the late 2000s/early 2010s. She has lost her mother and is keen to distance herself from her father, and throws herself into the Berlin clubbing scene, spending long nights and days partying, notably at ‘the Bunker’ (transparently Berghain) where she meets the much older American writer Marlowe, with whom she begins a tempestuous sort-of-relationship based around a mutual affection for art and the consumption of illicit substances.

A significant part of the book covers the ups and (predominantly) downs of their relationship, with scenes set predominantly at the Bunker and in a perpetual chemical haze. From the earliest stages of their relationship, it’s apparent that Marlowe sees Nila as little more than the next in a line of much younger women with whom he likes to amuse himself. She even ultimately befriends one of his previous cast-offs, Doreen, who herself forms a much healthier relationship with Nila’s much more likeable friend Eli. The appeal of Marlowe to Nila seems largely to be a combination of his lukewarm encouragement of her artistic dabblings, and his status as a way of prolonging her passport to oblivion while asking very few questions.

There are clues from early on that Nila’s life is focused on attempting to erase her identity. She claims to be Greek not only to Marlowe and his coterie but also to her long-established close friends. Losing herself in dark rooms thumping out techno, and the attendant morass of bodies and intoxicants, is another obvious form of not just escapism but deliberate self-erasure. This point is perhaps hammered home a little too much in the early sections, and it’s hard to find much to enjoy in its relentless darkness, though the mood and atmosphere is very well-rendered. Even her otherwise hard to fathom relationship with the pretentious and generally awful Marlowe seems to be a deliberate move to escape her real identity - the only real romantic passion we see from Nila is in a flashback to a brief teenage lesbian dalliance, and briefly in the direction of her friend Eli (a passion that is soon revealed as one more based in a kind of quasi-familial affection).

As a character, Marlowe lacks any obvious appeal beyond the slim pickings already mentioned, and seems to be there largely as a symbol of how far Nila is willing to debase herself on her pathway to oblivion. He repeatedly publicly humiliates her, sometimes for apparent sexual gratification and often just because he’s a dick; this emotional abuse inevitably turns physical (a fact he tries to present as ‘special’ to her) and by the end of the novel, when he’s destroyed any chances of maintaining his limited artistic career, he’s having his young plaything pay for his drugs, meals and day to day expenses. In a sense, his unrelenting awfulness does become somewhat compelling by force of persistence, but it’s a bit of an exhausting journey to get there.

The book becomes significantly more interesting as it reveals its real concern, something that it (like Nila) has perhaps deliberately repressed in favour of its immersion in the darkness of the night. Evidently, what Nila is repressing is her racial identity, and specifically her role as an Afghan in the post-9/11 west. The clues are very-much there from the beginning, in the swastikas scrawled on the walls of the estate in which she grew up, but they become closer to home as the book develops, with real-world racist violence (of deep concern to Nila, but almost inconsequential to Marlowe and his circle) coming ever-closer to home until it lands, in several forms, quite literally at her doorstep.

In the end, I found myself really immersed in Nila’s Berlin. It perhaps spends a little too much time on the unpleasant psychodrama of the Marlowe relationship and in the (admittedly evocative) depiction of drug-fuelled raving. But all of that is really a smokescreen for the book’s (and Nila’s) deeper concerns, which come to the surface in the book’s last section in memorable and impactful fashion. Along the way, there’s a lot to enjoy too, not least the repeated exposures of the hypocrisy of those in the liberal arts and cultural scene, from the fascists lurking at the heart of clubland to Marlowe’s art friends who arrange a charitable event in support of Afghanistan, not though to support its oppressed women, but its dogs.

Score

8.5

A slow-burner of a book, but really as a whole a great debut, which has a lot to say and does so with a poetic subtlety that takes its time to creep up on you but packs a punch when it does.

Next up

That Miranda July book, which I may or may not manage to squeeze in before the shortlist is imminently announced…