‘Good Girl’ is a harrowing portrait of family, fury and exile

What it means to be good – or not – is the infected wound at the center of Aria Aber’s debut novel, “Good Girl.” The narrator is a forlorn young woman named Nila Haddadi, and the story she tells sounds like a howl of despair transposed into the key of poetic retrospection. Indeed, the fact that this harrowing story recalls events from more than a decade ago provides the only reassurance that the narrator survived her teens.
Nila’s Afghan mother gave birth to her in Berlin during a burst of international optimism when the wall fell. But her neighborhood had already become a canker of xenophobia in the reunified city. “I was born inside its ghetto-heart,” Nila says, “as a small, wide-eyed rat.” She quickly develops a sense of herself as a mote buffeted about by disastrous geopolitics – particularly Russian and American hubris in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires.”
“Good Girl” is never overtly political, but the fabric of this story constantly catches on the barbed wire of Europe’s isolationism. Though set several years ago, the inhospitable culture that Aber describes anticipates the success this past fall of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing party advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants. And of course, such animus powers the incoming U.S. administration, too. Just last month, Trump trumpeter Elon Musk told his 210 million followers on X, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” American readers willing to hear the mingled frustration and despondency of an alienated generation will find in “Good Girl” a heartbreaking lament.
Aber’s writing thrums 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 that she includes in “Good Girl” are, sadly, elements of recent history, not fiction.
Before the novel opens, Nila’s parents were doctors in Kabul. They escaped with fake papers only to find themselves without credentials or jobs in the West. Nila’s birth delayed their deportation until they won citizenship in Germany, but unlike other immigrant families, hers “missed the quick, red-hot train to upward mobility.” They’ve remained stuck in a 14-story building littered with needles and tagged with swastikas. There are so many repulsive insects crawling across these pages that every copy of “Good Girl” should come with a can of Raid.
After years of this embittered exile, her mother died when Nila was 16. Her father, a Marxist who once dreamed of a better world, lingers on in their grubby flat filled with rubbish and rage. And so “Good Girl” begins.
Although Nila is strikingly bright, she can’t find any comfort at school or at home. To avoid others’ pity or suspicion, she tells everyone her family is from Greece. Meanwhile, her well-educated father may have abandoned the strictures of Islam, but he projects all the shame that sticks to liberated young women. Trapped in this crucible of fury and deceit, Nila withdraws ever further from home, feeling “ravaged by the hunger” to ruin her life. Naturally, life is eager to comply.
“Good Girl” concentrates on the particularly harrowing year when Nila turned 19. While nominally studying philosophy at Humboldt University, she spends most of her time strung out in Berlin’s “glittery, destructive underworld” listening to blaring techno. Her hip friends take “David Foster Wallace too seriously and deodorant not seriously enough.” Her father is too sunk in his grief to do anything but erupt periodically in fits of anger.
One night, at a grungy bar known as the Bunker, Nila spots the American writer Marlowe Woods. He’s an enfant terrible still skating on the sliver of fame produced by his one published book. Claiming that “being unemployed is the most radical thing you can do,” Marlowe hangs out in dives, distributes speed and cheats on his long-suffering girlfriend. At 36, he’s a manipulative, pompous creep in a battered leather jacket – he’s also a brilliant satire of a certain kind of attenuated literary celebrity still motoring along on the fumes of a few good reviews in publications nobody actually reads.
Nila says, “I was almost nauseous with attraction.” The nauseous part I get.
“Good Girl” is a brooding, claustrophobic story of alienation and erotic obsession, but plotting in the traditional sense is not a priority for Aber. This is more a wallowing than a journey. Nila ingests an astonishing smorgasbord of pills. Narcotic oblivion provides moments of relief from a life Nila can only barely endure. Despite hoping to become a photographer, she makes a series of disastrous decisions that thwart her academic and professional goals. Her father screams, gives up, screams again. And so her year of dissipation with Marlowe unfolds as a collection of bleak moments, including several sex scenes so depressing they could be used in a high school abstinence workshop.
Marlowe is an addict and a jerk who will never offer her the freedom or the validation she craves. Waiting several hundred pages for Nila to catch on is first painful, then exasperating. By the time a friend tells her “All you do is spin in circles,” we’ve already spun that diagnosis around the block.
Not that Aber’s prose doesn’t cast a spell. Like Joseph Conrad, she’s an evocative English stylist writing in her third language. Open “Good Girl” to any page and you’ll be immediately arrested by the haunting beauty of her work and the way desire pushes against the seams of despair.
In her debut poetry collection, “Hard Damage” (2019), Aber writes, “If you happen to be a daughter, you are forced to live a double life. You will become a con master: the good girl who has acquired X degrees, serves tea to her parents, dances at weddings, sends money home; and the girl who dances on tables, exchanges kisses with strangers, drinks Sharab, etc.”
The novel and the poetry collection are different creatures, of course, with their own particular strengths, but in both prose and verse, Aber touches the heart of a young woman struggling to find herself in the heat of clashing cultures.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”