On a chilly afternoon in the suburbs of Berlin, 19-year-old Nilab Haddadi is crying, or she isn’t. Nilab (called “Nila”), the narrator of Good Girl, won’t admit the truth, or has forgotten it. What she knows: the room is crawling with silverfish, the elevator reeks of urine and ash, she sleeps until dark in her dead mother’s dress. An aspiring photographer born in Germany to Afghan refugees, Nila has an appetite for obliteration that matches her burgeoning talents.
Eager to escape her family’s orthodoxies and their state-subsidised apartment in Gropiusstadt, Nila assumes a new identity and enters Berlin’s underground scene. There, she meets Marlowe Woods, a 30-something American writer who ushers her through art exhibitions, fundraisers, and after-parties — so many after-parties — with an arrhythmic charm. Their relationship blurs as Marlowe shifts between lover, mentor and dealer: crags of cocaine, MDMA and methamphetamine texture nearly every page.
Good Girl may very well be a book about addiction, but it’s not interested (or especially well-versed) in pharmacology. Nila’s comedowns are spiritual, not somatic. Author Aria Aber is more concerned with the existential struggle that undergirds Nila’s intellectual curiosity, performed passivity and after-hours accelerationism.
Shame is Aber’s subject, and she writes about Nila’s dark inheritance with poetic aplomb: “I would pray, I want to be good, though in the mornings, the yearning for God, like every true thing I had ever felt, embarrassed me, and I knew to whittle it down, until it paled in the back of my mind, like a pebble filed by the sea.”
A former Stegner fellow and Whiting Award winner, Aber moves from poetry to prose for the first time in Good Girl. While Nila’s routines quickly become anaesthetising, Aber’s lyrical descriptions of early 2000s Berlin quicken the novel’s pulse. In the affluent parts of Rudnow, new houses gleam with “soil and rosebushes”, stirring “Envy, that dusky, ancient tree, releasing its resin. Burrowing its roots into the mud of my heart.”
Reminiscent of An Education and On the Road, Good Girl is a highly engaging coming-of-age novel about a young artist whose development feels, even at its end, somewhat unfinished. Nila’s ambivalence towards the “nets” of nationality, language, and religion seem to linger even as the snow of a Berlin winter — and a searing adolescence — melts away.
- Kristen Malone Poli is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin
