Are We Human? Or Are We Good Girls?

Leah Abrams reviews Aria Aber’s debut novel “Good Girl.”

By Leah AbramsJanuary 26, 2025

• Fiction

I DON’T GET hit on all that often, but when I do, it follows a predictable script. I’m alone at a bar, staring at my phone or waiting for a friend, when a guy comes up behind me and whispers in my ear. If I indulge him or can’t find a way out of the conversation, then within the first minute, like clockwork, he’ll ask some version of “So, what are you?” or “Where are you from?”—or my favorite: “You are a gorgeous specimen; what is that?”

So it goes for Nila, the 19-year-old protagonist of Aria Aber’s much-anticipated new debut novel, Good Girl. On the verge of a bender at the Bunker, Aber’s playful pseudonym for the legendary Berlin club Berghain, Nila meets Marlowe Woods, a burnt-out American novelist who seems to have walked straight out of a Lana Del Rey song. And what should Marlowe ask but that horrible question: where are you from? And what should he do but the “dreadful thing [Nila] always feared people would do—he asked again, he asked where [she] was really from.” 

Greece, Nila tells him. It’s a convenient construction, one she uses liberally on friends and club compatriots, masking her actual origins as not only a German-born Afghan but also one who lives, still, in Neukölln’s Gropiusstadt public housing complex with her widowed father. Can you blame her? Nila grew up watching her parents lie at the pharmacy, claiming to be from France and Spain. Following familial fights in her adolescence over miniskirts and a series of flirtations with boys, Nila is sent off—on scholarship—to an all-girls boarding school in the countryside, where she reinvents herself as Colombian, Christian Egyptian, Israeli. “Anything,” she says, “anything but Muslim.” She keeps up the facade after school, tunneling deftly into Berlin’s vast and vibrant underground even as she refuses to reveal her roots.

“Of course, I had tried to be good,” Nila tells us. But whose version of good? The kind her family expects (modest, studious, pure)? Or the type she encounters at the club: unbothered, daring, hedonistic?

Good Girl lends itself to breakneck reading. Many will surely delight in its recognizable tropes—feeling, as per well-loved online parlance, seen. You could almost create a bingo card of the much-memed-upon facets of the Millennial Novel and play as you go. Light BDSM with a much older man? Check. Vaguely bisexual protagonist who doesn’t end up with a girl? Check. Self-destructive partying to cope with late-stage capitalism? Check. “Girl-ification”? Check. “My immigrant parents will never understand me and neither will my white peers”? Check and check. The list goes on; comb carefully enough and you’ll win, no Free Space needed.

Of course, this is a dull way to read, and an especially dull way to read a novel of this caliber. For Aber has written not just a “Millennial Novel” about the coming-of-age of a young, ambitious artist, but also what we might more precisely call a “modern passing novel”: a Künstlerroman in which the protagonist obscures her identity to pursue aesthetic dreams, walking a tightrope of her own interwoven lies as she goes.

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The “passing” plot in its various forms represents a hallmark of Western literature. Viola crosses gender lines to masquerade as Cesario in Shakespeare’s early modern masterpiece Twelfth Night; class-passing interlopers like Jay Gatsby and The Secret History’s Richard Papen don disguises of their own in popular modern and contemporary novels, respectively. In the antebellum South, racial passing plots were first popularized as propagandistic threats warning against the “dilution” of the white race by so-called impostors; these were followed by cautionary morality tales characterizing the act as a Faustian bargain, a betrayal of one’s own kind (think James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 fictional account The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man). Perhaps most famous is Nella Larsen’s aptly titled Passing, published in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Surveying Nila’s paranoia in Good Girl—the way she checks every taxi in the rearview mirror, silently praying she won’t lock eyes with “an uncle”—I couldn’t help but contrast her with Larsen’s Clare Kendry, who jetés nimbly across a tightrope of her own, almost winking.

The conditions of passing in 20th-century New York were incited by Jim Crow and our country’s long history of domestic terrorism against Black people; the conditions of passing in 20th-century Europe were incited by the Nazi’s Third Reich. Good Girl concerns itself with the post-9/11 West, wherein collective punishment against Muslims and Arabs has become not just a vigilante cry but enshrined policy of the state as well. “After 9/11,” Nila explains, “everything burned. […] All matter around the event decomposed too.”

Still, Nila’s lies aren’t just a matter of protection—they’re also a matter of pride. “[N]ine times out of ten,” she writes, “it was easier to tell a lie than to watch pity distort someone’s face.” Fair enough. Nila is dead set on avoiding pity; she may have been born the child of refugees in public housing, but she refuses to be marked as such. She yearns for beauty, regality, distinction—and, peering through the Leica lens of her country, she learns to see these as incompatible with her own identity. Remembering a childhood moment in which her mother hit her in public and a white, German woman came, unhelpfully, to intervene, Nila writes: “I could barely look at them, unwilling to see what they reflected about me but suspecting that their souls were inscribed with some secret, ontological truth about mine. She pitied me, I understood, and in turn I felt degraded.”

Nila’s quest to avoid pity is at odds with her desire to be seen, her human need to be looked at and understood. Much as she wants to be known, closely and completely, by Marlowe—as a lover, an equal, an artistic peer—she can only get as close as her secrets allow. These dueling urges, the suspense they create coupled with the book’s pervasive uncertainty and guilt surrounding “goodness,” propel Aber’s narrative. Will she be discovered? By her family or her boyfriend? Which would be worse, which more pitiful? Even as her relationship with Marlowe grows increasingly circular (verging, at times, on redundancy) these questions sustain momentum, reading less like a straight line or linear arc than a downward, doomed spiral.

However isolated she may feel, Nila is—at least off the page—far from alone. Watching her flounder through a novel’s worth of encounters, I started to assemble a canon of contemporary takes on an old theme: millennial experiments with the so-called “ethnically ambiguous,” adventures in the false promise of a post-racial society. Their protagonists, typically young women, traipse through identity categories that appear both fake and real, reaching to establish significance while also, inevitably, reducing their subjects to ticked boxes. One thinks of Nila’s fellow party girl from Marlowe Granados’s 2020 novel Happy Hour (notably, Granados blurbed Aber’s book). Isa, Granados’s own mixed-race protagonist, has a slightly smoother style, maybe because she has two years on Nila. She never lies outright but finds clever ways of eluding the question, refusing to engage in the first place. “What is your history? Where are you from? Your parents, I mean,” a young man asks Isa early in the novel. “Are you asking why I’m so pretty?” counters Isa. “If you are, just ask me that.” Addressing the reader, she adds: “Did you know it is possible to push back without anyone even noticing?” 

There’s Yasmin Zaher’s unnamed protagonist in The Coin (2024), who selectively reveals her Palestinian heritage where and when it suits her; there’s Elif Batuman’s Selin, who, in The Idiot (2017), is “complimented [on her] idiomatic English and asked how long [she has] been in America” (forever—she’s from Jersey). These characters, struggling “good girls” of every variety, subtly disprove the au courant theory that “a singular focus on identity” is destroying modern art. First and foremost because “identity” is not some newfangled invention of the 2016 resistance lib but, rather, a fundamental component of the creation of the self, art’s central fixation. And second, because questions of identity—racial, gender, social, political and otherwise—are generative precisely because they contrive a discordant perception (the world’s myth of the Other) with reality (one’s own rich internal life): a game of friction also known as plot. 

Good Girl approaches this friction directly, rubbing stacked, competing guilts up against one other. Still, Nila is unique among her contemporary peers in not only her willingness to entertain the questions but also the degree to which she has built a false identity around them in her public and private life alike. The novel goes to great lengths to rationalize her decisions, detailing countless examples of anti-Muslim, or anti-“foreigner” (to use the German dog whistle) violence. At one point, Aber puts her in a scene with literal Nazis, who come over to Marlowe’s looking to buy speed and don’t leave until they’ve called her “Jew Nose.” And then there’s the time Nila attends a gala with Marlowe at his wealthy friend’s flat, a fundraiser for stray “Afghan dogs.”

The scenes themselves are convincing but, taken together with the book’s recounting of history, they read as if Aber is out to prove something—to justify Nila’s actions with shows of extreme violence. They lack the prickly, understated fear one experiences reading Passing and discovering the vile nickname Jack, Clare’s husband, bestows on his wife: the sudden, visceral understanding that Clare is playing with fire in her open palm.

Nila, by contrast, seems overexplained. I found myself wishing that Aber had trusted the reader to understand her better, to take the stakes of her situation as a given. After all, we don’t live in a post-racial world, and we don’t need to waste time trying to bicker over it, much less assume defensive postures. If you’ve ever been asked about your origins, you’ll know immediately where Nila is coming from—and if you haven’t, you can pick it up on the fly. In its understandable but ultimately unfortunate desire to avoid alienating the latter group, Good Girl spells itself out too clearly, forgetting that it’s Nila’s experiences, reactions, and emotions we’re after, not her list of reasons.

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If Aber errs on the side of overexplanation, let us be grateful that those explanations are (generally speaking) stunning on a sentence level. Good Girl is truly a poet’s novel, replete with sparkling prose. Aber employs assonance and alliteration with visceral bite: the texture of her words evokes Berlin’s dark edges, its cavernous, labyrinthine alleyways. The city and its inhabitants throb, mournfully and viscerally, from the page: “A wall of warm air and muffled techno batter[s]” you in the Bunker. The Jewish Museum is a “colossus of sorrow in the soul of our city.” A meth-addled Nazi’s jaw muscle “puls[es] like a food processor.”

Part of Nabokov’s genius is said to come from the fact that he wrote in his third language, English, which he could see from some remove. As Nila herself, debating a random partygoer on the relative prowess of Nabokov and Baudelaire, thinks at the aforementioned gala: “[T]he poetic intensity of [Nabokov’s] style stemmed from the fact that he was exiled in English; that he excavated the strangeness of English because he was a foreigner in it.” The same could be said of Aber, who grew up speaking Farsi and German before becoming a Whiting Award–winning poet in English, her third tongue. Here, as in her poetry, she deploys Nabokov’s keen invention with language—if not always his sense of irony.

For while the book benefits from the poet’s precision, it occasionally suffers from what we might call the poet’s melodrama. We never fully enter the territory of cliché, but we certainly circle its borders. Slightly too-precious phrases like “A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out,” and “He was disgusted with me, I thought—or disgusted with himself,” upset the broadly fine balance of Aber’s prose, as do played out references to, say, Nila’s “unruly ponytail” or the way Marlowe’s “blue eyes pierced the page with intelligence.” You’ll forgive this Gen Z reader the eye roll. Despite the Lana of it all, the twee feels out of place in this otherwise weighty novel, concerned as it is with a woman coming into herself at long last.

And come into herself she does. “One of the more reliable chemical reactions in European culture occurs when particles of German mental matter enter Italy,” Thomas Meaney recently posited in The New Yorker. “Suddenly, German writers discover that life is worth living again, as they succumb to the view from the veranda.” Meaney was talking about Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, dialectical theorists of the Frankfurt School on holiday in Naples, but he could just as well have been writing of Nila, who accompanies Marlowe on a work trip to Venice in the novel’s climax. It’s her first time seeing the ocean; one drunken night, isolated and outclassed at one of Marlowe’s fancy parties, Nila takes ecstasy and sobs, breaking down as she looks out across the evocative blue expanse. Back in their hotel room, she finally fesses up—first, in person, to Marlowe; next, over text, to all of her friends. Such vulnerability incites physical pain: Nila punches her pillow; she hides her face in shame. Even after she comes clean, she continues to distrust those closest to her, imagining “the page of a book, or the camera’s lens, those liars—shielding [her] heart.” 

It’s her heart, after all, that she’s out to protect—or, at the very least, to purify. Nila thinks of her favorite story of the Prophet Muhammad, which appears three times over the course of the Qur’an. When Muhammad was a child, the angel Gabriel came to him and pulled his heart from his chest and washed away every sin, every sign of Satan. She prays for the same fate to befall her: to have her “heart sliced open, rinsed in snow.” 

It’s a desire almost too pure for this world, which arguably grows more disgusting by the day. Still, what’s the alternative? We must find a way, Aber tells us, to live without succumbing to despair. And so, forsaking the party in her search for purity, Nila begins again. For Clare, there was tragedy—for Nila, redemption. She moves to London to pursue photography; she leaves Marlowe once and for all; and she talks, finally (and frankly), with her father. She comes back into herself, one united whole, “Greek” no more.

“It is all a petty, silly matter of no real importance, ” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in a 1929 review of Larsen’s novel. He was referring to the act of passing itself, which, he claimed, “another generation will comprehend with great difficulty.” Aber’s debut, flaws and all, proves just how wrong he was.