From “Optics: crystals exhibiting interference colours” (1868) | René Henri Digeon, after J. Silberman / Wellcome Collection / Public Domain Mark
Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, unmapped interiors plotted like mazes; all kinds of substances and substance mixing; the constant possibility of sex; and the thrumming of music so intense it could, if you let it, reconfigure your body and mind. And it is in this scene that Nila, the 19-year-old protagonist of poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), seeks to, as she puts it, “ruin” her life.
Nila is really Nilab Haddadi, the daughter of Afghan immigrants, with strict rules to be a dokhtare khub, a good girl—“no boyfriends, no foul language, no sybaritic lifestyle”—so as not to become a dokhtare kharab: “a broken bad, ruined girl.” In her interactions outside of the Afghan community, however, Nila prefers to pass as Greek, Colombian, or Spanish as a shield from anti-Muslim prejudice. The mortification she feels about her ethnicity is matched only by her second-generation smugness, since as a child she “watched art-house movies” and “read Kafka and Büchner, devoured a canon [her] parents had very little understanding of.” And she dives headlong into drugs, partying, and lust.
The novel that ensues is a double portrait of a young woman artist coming of age and the techno scene she chooses as her site of self-discovery. Aber details the interiors of Berlin’s nightclubs, including its myriad characters with insight; there’s a sense that we’re reading someone who is or was part of this world, who observed it closely. Her prose, with its distinctive descriptions and metaphors, mirrors her poetry, as does the intensely introspective narration of Nila, who tells us her story in exquisitely crafted sentences.
Nila describes her preferred club, a Berghain stand-in referred to in the book as the Bunker, as “a shelter from the war of our daily lives” where “the machines of our bodies could roam free and dream.” It’s there she meets 36-year-old Marlowe Woods, an American writer struggling through his second book after a successful debut. Together they gambol through Berlin’s club scene, fueled by amphetamines, techno, and allusions to radical politics. “The party—the underground of the world—is where we unleash the id and the present desires,” Marlowe philosophizes. “What is more authentic than your base desire?” Yet Nila can’t shake off the fear of being found out, by friends for being Afghan and by her family and community for her partying.
For Nila, self-portrait photography becomes the place she can acknowledge and unite her divided self—the cost of that double self-denial emphasized by repeated descriptions of her gaunt, tattered, tortured beauty. Unfortunately, Aber piles on so much torture that a reader may be just as mystified as Nila in trying to find the person under all that pain: her mother’s death, her father’s rancor, Germany’s anti-Islamism, a narcissist boyfriend who ends up becoming a drug dealer and physically assaulting her, and on top of that, her internalized racism, her struggle to develop her artistic practice, her readiness for self-destruction. “Once, I was a girl. I wanted to be free,” Nila declares, but the kind of freedom she is chasing is never quite clear. Even when a reckoning is set in motion by an empathetic conversation with a Tigray taxi driver and a vehement retching after a bad pill, very little seems to change. The novel limps to the finish line: Nila lands a place at an art school in London, which conveniently closes the chapter on her time in Berlin. The tension between tradition and escape that should have been the core conflict of the novel is resolved not through introspection but a change of scene, from one gray city to another.
In Good Girl, Berlin’s rave culture also has two sides. Aber hints that though the techno scene may claim to uphold values of liberation, it’s all an illusion. Even if the “inky dark” of the Bunker offers a reprieve, the world awaits, and any trust in its protective qualities dissipates in the harsh light of Berlin’s racialized violence—aggressive encounters with neo-Nazis donning boots embossed with the Reichsadler; the shootings and razing of Muslim-owned businesses, including the local Afghan bakery in Nila’s neighborhood. The scene’s defenders are the likes of self-aggrandizing Marlowe, who preaches that the “sole purpose of techno music and its culture” is “Deleuzian,” since “we’re small machines trapped in the big machine of capitalism, and techno can defamiliarize this existentially fraught condition.” Perhaps raving can deterritorialize us from capitalist competition toward a collective state of ecstasy—and freedom, albeit an ephemeral kind. But Marlowe’s attempts to make rave’s fleeting freedoms permanent lead to his own unhappiness, his desire to overcome desire proving impossible to fulfill. At a lackluster reading, Nila realizes that the “rich and bighearted prince” of the Bunker is just a striving writer “bathed in the light of mediocrity” in the outside world.
And Nila’s conviction in the value of raving itself starts to weaken: “I believed all of us were committed to the parallel world we had constructed out of techno and drugs, the nocturnal underbelly of our city, precisely because we rejected those things,” she reflects. “My hedonistic soul rebelled against a nine-to-five job, a townhouse, parents with a child. I did not want tradition … This life of the people we called Normalos, the strictures of those we called Spießer. They didn’t know what it meant to live, after all, did they?” But the friends she still respects know it’s time to move on. “I don’t want all this Bunker crap forever, you know?” the level-headed Elias tells her. “I want what everyone wants. A townhouse. A wife, two children, and a dog.”
Towards the end of the novel, Nila is coming to a similar conclusion: It turns out that even the seduction of Berlin nightlife—which had seemed nearly sacrosanct—won’t last. To have gone through an alphabet of drugs, excavated the limits of ego and endurance, and lost hours to dance, only to arrive at this conclusion—it’s the worst comedown of all.
