Good Girl by Aria Aber: book review
Overview: Nila enters a world of partying and drugs as a young teenager, but it's the year she turns nineteen that she fully immerses herself in the underground techno-club-rave world, sometime in the early 2010s. She escapes the strict rules at home in the Bunker, one of the famous Berlin warehouse techno clubs with a strict door policy. There, she meets an American writer, once famous, named Marlowe. She spends the next year in an electric, dark relationship with him, surrounded by his friend group and ex-girlfriend that define Nila's first adult experiences. Overall: 3.5
Characters: 3 What frustrates me about this book is that it feels like the ending of this novel is the true beginning of Nila's story. When I got to the end, after wondering where the book was heading, I got the distinct impression that I'd read a novel's worth of backstory and got dropped off right at the true turning point. While it could be argued that facing an abusive relationship with an older man who also pushed her towards exploring her art could be formative, it's largely not in this novel. Nila, though she's forced to accept things about herself and gain a greater depth in her thoughts about herself in the world, stays largely unchanged through these major experiences. Finally, enough things build up to force her to commit to the big change, but we never see her reach this moment of change. It just feels like Nila is too young and pliable at this point to really lead a novel super successfully, and I found myself wishing I could read the novel where Nila takes on London. She just gets too deeply folded into Marlowe and all that's left to be her own is her struggle with her cultural heritage and the fear of the growing far right terror attacks against immigrants in Germany, which is one of the quieter, more external sub-plots. I wished that Nila got a chance to firmly assert herself more in the way she's set up to in the next chapter of her journey.
The other characters are a bit hazy. Doreen, Marlowe's ex-girlfriend, is painted to be at once extremely smart and ditzy. Eli hangs on the periphery—someone Nila had her own relationship with before joining the friend group. As a fellow immigrant, he understands a lot of what Nila has experienced much more deeply than the others, and he comes through with an overwhelming gentleness in a very dark, sharp world. Marlowe is an addict, though he won't admit this to himself, which has cost him is career. He loses his principles and much of his personality over the course of the novel and eventually succumbs to hurting Nila to make himself feel better.
Plot: 3 The plot is difficult because the page count overwhelms the very subtle moves that Aber is making. Nila does have an arc, but it's a quiet one that really only comes together at the very end of the novel. There's definitely a murky middle problem here where you start to wonder how many techno-club-on-drugs scenes you can take. They don't reveal anything new about the characters or plot and lose their novelty after a while. I felt like there could've been 100 fewer pages and that the sharper scalpel in the editing could've unearthed a truly spectacular, propulsive novel.
Writing: 4 The thing that makes me sad about this novel is that the first chapter was pure electric brilliance. I was completely hooked for the first fifty pages and then it began to sag, and I stopped being eager to pick up the book or continue turning the pages while I was reading. Nothing was ever better than those first few crystal clear pages that had such an arresting voice and an interesting new world that eventually grew tired. The writing also didn't hold as strong through the entirety of the book. I was so excited by Aber's prose at the start, especially her sharp use of language, and while there's glimmers of this through the book, it does feel like the unique lens and incisive eye muddles as the pages pile up. This is one of those books that was far from bad but felt like it had the potential to be great instead of good if it had just been worked over another time or two.
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