The Kafkaesque struggle of a German Afghan girl is too current

Every once in a while a first novel comes along that heralds a voice like no other, with a layered story and sentences that crackle and explode, begging to be read aloud. Aria Aber’s splendid “Good Girl” features precisely that voice, chronicling the misadventures of a young German Afghan woman among the nightclubs and drug dens of Berlin as she plunges into a volatile romance with an expatriate American writer. The book is not without its doubts, but Aber, an award-winning poet, strikes gold here, just as Kaveh Akbar did in the acclaimed “Martyr!” from last year.

Aber’s narrator, Nila, now on the cusp of 30, remembers a decade ago, her 19-year-old self, when she entered the orbit of Marlowe, a 36-year-old Californian who had published a famous novel in his youth but He hadn’t moved on, instead wallowing in liquor and ecstasy, jumping from bed to bed. Nila’s parents had been doctors in Kabul, but after emigrating to Berlin they were forced to accept menial jobs. They are rooted in her father’s family and in the Afghan working-class community, which the author brilliantly evokes: “My grandmother had the face of a fox, or that of a Soviet actress: thin, tattooed eyebrows over gray-green eyes, always bleached blonde hair. She loved to complain and had seven children, including my father. “She was the only one who wore a chador and God was a guide rather than a law.”

Nila feels the clash between a strict Shiite upbringing and her lustful impulses. She had won a scholarship to an exclusive girls’ school, where she had snuck out to party, and had suffered back-to-back tragedies when her mother died suddenly and a girlfriend abandoned her. Nila’s fear of abandonment drives “Good Girl”; his emotions spin through the pages. Back in the city, he maintains a détente with his widowed father and the waitresses at a jazz club while applying to art schools in London; she longs to be a photographer in the style of Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus. But she can’t escape the temptations that surround her.

If Nila is a casual good girl, then Marlowe is a bad boy, a Dionysus of the Berlin milieu, dispensing ecstasy and sex, gathering outsiders and anti-capitalists into his sphere. The connections are fluid and the reflections on politics are abundant. (There’s even a cat named Leon Trotsky.) Nila falls under the spell of this fast-moving crowd “who took David Foster Wallace too seriously and deodorant not seriously enough.” Squeezed between “bacterial” baths, she immerses herself in a tide of speed and acid, and then lies to her father when she stumbles home, her hair reeking of cigarettes. Marlowe, while in an open relationship with another woman, is attracted to Nila’s adventurous spirit and caustic intelligence. He gives her a Nikkormat camera and encourages her to pursue her passion. Their intimacy is dyed purple amid explosions of obsession and tenderness, but Aber nimbly pulls off Rimbaud’s act.

“Good Girl,” then, is a bildungsroman, magnificently packed with Nila’s epiphanies about literature and philosophy, a story of seductive risks and the burdens of diaspora. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” looms over “Good Girl” as its heroine undergoes a radical transformation. Marlowe considers himself more than just a lover; he is also a mentor, gently guiding her toward her own desires and how to express them through the art she makes (and indulging in a little mansplaining). She embraces and resents him, a 21st-century reworking of “Romeo and Juliet,” and like Shakespeare’s characters, the duo move toward their doom. Your connection is broken.

Nila’s plan is to go west; indeed, Aber’s prose has the lyrical tone of Mohsin Hamid’s fiction. His reckless behavior, including a trip to Italy, results in a form of house arrest, which strains his relationship with his surviving father: “When my father left the apartment, he grabbed that chain of keys that was hanging and locked the door from the outside like If I were a janitor. …My father tall and skinny with silver streaks in his hair, eyebrows that I brushed and trimmed.”

Like Nila, Aber grew up in Berlin and spoke Farsi and German. Ultimately, the division within Nila reflects the growing chasm between east and west; rightly perceives a rise in xenophobic nationalism in Europe and the United States. “Good Girl” views our current unrest through an inclusive prism: As the novel concludes, Nila visits an international cemetery, filled with the gravestones of Turks and Muslims, Germans and Jews. Literature, Aber suggests, can not only unite warring peoples, but also unite our personal conflicts.

“On a molecular level, I believed, I understood what he wrote, including why he turned Gregor into a giant insect,” Nila observes of Kafka’s canonical work. “Who would better understand the dangers of a man trapped in his childhood bedroom in an inhumane way than an Afghan girl trying to live?”

Hamilton Cain is a book reviewer in New York and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”