Raves & Clichés: Aria Aber’s Good Girl – Danielle Chelosky
March 31, 2025
It’s a common trope: A young woman meets a man ten or so years older and falls under his spell. I was—like Good Girl’s protagonist Nila—nineteen, and seduced by the idea of a lover who could also be a teacher. Aria Aber’s debut novel centers on this risky kind of romance, through the publicity focused on Nila’s hedonistic lifestyle and her alienating Afghan identity in Berlin. But what moves Good Girl forward is her toxic relationship with Marlowe, a thirty-six-year-old writer from America, who she meets at The Bunker (a stand-in for Berghain). He’s known for his work, but he’s also known for cycling through younger women, which does nothing to stop Nila from being the next one.
Good Girl was published by Hogarth in January, and was met with praise from The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Aber, an award-winning poet, told Interview Magazine: “I wanted to write a story that deals with this very typical and often reductively portrayed relationship between a young person and an older person who…could be seen as predatory.” The problem with Good Girl is just exactly this: Nila and Marlowe’s relationship is nothing more than a hollow trope, held up by reductive clichés that merely serve as plot devices.
Paraded as a party novel, Good Girl is meant to be a relief from the avalanche of trauma-laden plots. But there’s obviously much more to Good Girl than raving. On the first page, Nila mentions a swastika graffitied in her public housing complex. She introduces us to the bleak landscape of Berlin, where her parents sought asylum after being exiled from Afghanistan. “My parents, you understand, were doing okay in the other country,” she explains; they’d worked hard in med school, but their fate was ultimately determined for them by war. Then, her mother died from a blood clot in her brain when Nila was sixteen. Subsequently, her father, shaken by grief, “rarely left the apartment, sat frozen on the couch and stared at the wall.”
Such tragedy leads one to give up, especially if they’re a teenager. Nila is a victim of learned helplessness, “ravaged by the hunger to ruin [her] life,” which comes in the form of snorting drugs in The Bunker’s bathroom stalls and dancing until the sun rises. Marlowe is the perfect tool for self-destruction; she knows he will hurt her, but she welcomes the pain because it is as intense as love. When Vogue asked about the process of shifting from poetry to fiction, Aber mentioned that she “read a lot of movie scripts and theater plays to learn more about dialogue.” This may explain why a lot of the dialogue is tacky; why read movie scripts and theater plays to learn about dialogue for a book? It does not translate well, especially when it comes to conversations between Nila and Marlowe. In one particularly cringeworthy passage, Marlowe tells Nila he wants to protect her, to which Nila dramatically replies, “I don’t want to be protected.” It gets worse: “You know that I’m ruining you, right? Even if I am trying not to,” Marlowe says, like a character in a Danielle Steel bestseller.
While some dialogue comes off as lowbrow, elsewhere it can be unbearably pretentious. At a fancy fundraising dinner Marlowe dragged her to, Nila is intimidated by the atmosphere of sophistication and wealth, only Aber communicates it in the most laughably unrealistic ways: “Well, we were discussing whether Baudelaire is more poetic than Nabokov. On a sentence level,” a boss from Marlowe’s architecture firm says to Nila. Though Aber is attempting to express just how snobby these aristocrats are, it doesn’t work when there was a previous scene where Nila, Marlowe, and their friends were arguing about Michel Houellebecq. The moment felt like a space for Aber to air out her personal frustrations with the controversial French author, but it did nothing to help Nila seem any less pretentious than the people in Marlowe’s posh world who supposedly make her feel small. Meanwhile, the amount of artists Aber casually name-drops is endless—Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Sally Mann, Goethe, Man Ray, Einstürzende Neubauten, Büchner, Hesse, Breton, for instance—giving Aber the impression of the elitists Nila apparently resents.
Nila hides her Afghan identity from Marlowe and her friends throughout Good Girl, a habit—or, more accurately, survival instinct—she’s been practicing for years. But the stakes don’t feel necessarily high. What would Marlowe do if he found out? It doesn’t hold much weight when Marlowe has already begun physically abusing her. The abuse is handled incredibly clumsily. It begins at that fundraising dinner, where a fight leads to her encouraging him to hit her. “An entire unspoken life transpired between our eyes,” goes the vapid prelude to the violence. “Then he tilted my chin forward. The thump was sudden. A strain in my neck. My skull, my left eye. It took me a moment to understand that he hadn’t hit me in the face with his fist. Instead, he’d clasped my jaw, twisted my head to the side, and thrust me into the wall.” From there, he becomes less loving. The sex mirrors this. “There was no foreplay, but he got hard quickly, and he shut my mouth while I sat on top of him, and afterward I bled a little, the sheets ruined immediately. Without saying anything, I followed him into the bathroom, where he washed me again. Then we spoke about nothing, lying side by side as in graves, or boats.” As Nila’s agency disappears, it feels as if Aber is giving up, too. How did Nila bleed from sex? Did she consent to that aggression? Why is it only barely mentioned? If Aber is going to include such a horrid detail, there should be more than just a few disaffected words.
The abuse looms awkwardly over a meandering plot. Just when Nila is about to get out of the relationship, she moves in with him. Though that action could represent the difficulty of leaving an abusive relationship, Aber does not frame it nearly convincingly enough; it just feels like she needs to keep the book moving forward. The abuse is mentioned in embarrassingly flippant ways, like when Nila is “laughing about the bruise on [her] heart and the bruise on [her] face.” You’d think a poet would pick her words more carefully with such a serious subject. When Marlowe begins to hit her during sex, she doesn’t remember if she asked for it. What is the reader supposed to make of this? The ambiguity comes across as lazy as Aber makes Nila’s life vaguely and predictably worse before tying up the book with a happy ending: Nila’s acceptance to a university in London.
What finally tears Nila away from Marlowe? They’re at a café and Nila notices two women her age sitting with an older man. The man appears to be the boyfriend of one of the women. He is buying them bottles of champagne. The women look happy and they’re dressed in a sexy yet luxurious way, making Nila “hyperaware of [her] old, thrifted dress, of [her] chipped nail polish.” When Marlowe notices her staring at them, he scoffs and says, “They’re idiots…Do you think any of them know about Deleuze?” Seriously, who talks like this? Wondering if the women feel repulsed by her, Nila replies by saying she’s going to leave him. The implication is that she realizes she cannot sneak her way into a higher class, but why is that what prompts her to leave Marlowe? Was the entire relationship just her attempt to elevate? It would make sense then why the relationship felt so empty; it was just a drawn-out metaphor after all. But metaphors need depth.
Despite its marketing as a fun novel, Good Girl is just more commercial fiction with a young female protagonist who has no agency and must suffer cliché instances of abuse before finding herself. Reading Good Girl is like having a great night at a rave ruined by your friend’s controlling boyfriend. Luckily instead of putting up with it, you can just close the book.