Good Girl by Aria Aber review – coming of age in Berlin

Nila is the wild, rebellious daughter of Afghan doctors who fled their home before she was born and settled in a brutalist social housing block in Berlin. After 9/11, the family learned to lie (“To resent ourselves with precision”), to hide parts of themselves that seemed too much like “those people”; Muslims in a city where Nazis were alive and well. Then her mother died, and Nila began looking for a way out. Venturing out of her neighbourhood, she saw “people drinking mulled wine at Christmas markets, and between them, everywhere, there was a Mohammed or an Ali or an Aisha trying to get by”. And she hated them, “hated everyone who had the same fate as I did … I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.”

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, follows the grieving Nila as she comes of age in the nightclubs of Berlin. At The Bunker, Nila does ecstasy and falls into an unequal romance with a charismatic American author who dominates and desires her in just the way the damaged creature inside her craves. Marlowe Woods offers her an escape from the Afghan ideal of a “good girl”. He is also a tedious narcissist who pontificates about art, obliviously invites neo-Nazis into his house, and finds foreign cab drivers (some of whom are Nila’s uncles) too depressing to talk to. At the same time, he seems to give himself credit for Nila’s artistic awakening as a photographer: an awakening that is rooted in her otherness, in the yearning both to estrange herself from and depict her parents, to make them beautiful to Europeans. Nila loves literature and art because they make her “a person incomprehensible” to her parents, and yet photography gives her access to her mother’s “secret inner life, adrift in our strange city … an unknowable loss marking her eyes”.

Nila’s grief underpins all the pages of partying and sex. At its heart, Good Girl is the story of a young woman who needs her mother, no matter how screwed up by centuries of geopolitics and patriarchal culture that mother may have been. Returning home after a long time away, “what I did was lie in bed and sleep until dark, covering my face with her dress”.

Much of this dark, breathtaking novel is about the tortures of being 19, penniless, and obsessed with literature, sex and beauty. But its most profound insights concern the indignities we dual-culture Persian daughters know so viscerally: the intertwined shames of body and country, and a sense of superiority in our western educations. The time we snubbed a relative for being “too Persian” in public. Parents who love violently but can’t say “I love you”. Most of all, though, the shame of sex in our bodies, hairy and dark, “uncultured and uncouth, barely good enough for sex”.

What enthrals me about Aber’s writing is that it doesn’t hide the specifically Persian damage that Americans or English would find offensive: the complicated histories of self-loathing and abuse that might feed their racism or white judgment. “Don’t hit your child. You’re in Germany now,” a woman says to Nila’s mother. Somehow, everyone is implicated. Nila’s father smothers her face under a pillow. Parents call toddlers stupid for not having adult sense. And then there are the ugly instincts that run generations deep: the way Nila turns away from congregating Arab teens, “like a lump of bad luck”. The subservient triumph of being chosen over a white woman while knowing that even winning debases you.

This novel is so fresh, though I could have done with less of Marlowe’s art talk and less time spent partying, drunk or high. The queer sex scene between Nila and her first love Setareh, however, is wonderfully revealing in its timidity. “And still we were Afghan girls. There was a formality to our movements as we undressed, even here.” For me, the novel should have ended after the third of four acts. Aside from a few essential climactic scenes, part four is largely sensemaking, redemption and goodbye, epiphanies too readily spelled out.

Still, Good Girl is a must-read about the complexities of Afghan sexuality, family, shame, poverty and power. And it includes some truly chilling flashes of human ugliness: an Iranian philanthropist raising money for afghan dogs instead of Afghan women; tourists at Holocaust monuments posing with Starbucks cups; or the mayor apologising after learning that the victim of an arson attack was Greek. “‘We didn’t know … ’ [as if] it would have been only half as bad if he had been a Muslim.” Throughout all this, Nila shines in her wildness, in her yearning for beauty and freedom. She is broken and defiant and bold, outlining for herself a new kind of purity, goodness and faith, her own anthems of youth: “Oh, how much power it had taken me to defy everything they wanted for my life.”