Sunday, February 16th

Alejandro: There’s a number of falling in love with people

Which I think is very 19 yr old

Mo: And “ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life” and “your one job on earth is to make everyone as miserable as your own sad self”

Satisfying to sink into a novel, I gotta say. A warm bath up to the neck.

A: True. I’m interested by what I’ve read so far

M: What’s grabbing you?

A: There’s something here about social belonging weighed against class

The convo about gentrification at the cafe reminds me a bit of the chicken shop scene in native son

Plus the very clear two-ness of the soul, with the keeping of appearances for both the friends and the family separately

M: Shit I haven’t read native son since undergrad, remind me?

A: He just started working as a chauffeur and the daughter and her bf who’s the communist have him take them to a place he would go

And they just talk about like theory and he’s confused the whole time about why they're so weird

Okay, so chapter 7 is an absolute gem, I was so taken by it!

It’s giving auteur, it’s giving Zadie Smith, maybe even a little Rushdie

It’s a cultural immersion that doesn’t feel so much like an explanation for a white audience, but instead a character study of Nila, gorgeously done

I could spend thousands of characters referencing all of the times that these almost exact thing happened to me while I too was in a situationship with a writer/photographer

Instead I will say, yes reader, this is what its like, in all its byronesque, incredulous, melodrama

M: Okay yes the gentrification conversation feels very reminiscent. And the phrasing of “what I believe in is being anti-gentrification.”

You’re so right, chapter 7 could nearly stand on it own

Its also doing some of what you were commenting on about the two-ness of the soul but less in terms of friends vs family, more explicitly along lines of race/culture

With that and also the situationship stuff and Marlowe I’m a lot about her reading his book and that being a big part of how she gets to know him // thinks she understands him (and the thing that makes her feel she could fall in love with him?!) and his book being a description of his childhood and his parents, and then how in a way this chapter functions as that for her but for the reader maybe, but the whole novel is setting us up to be reading her version of the book that got Marlowe famous

What do you make of her saying “how vulnerable I felt after reading his book” on pg 81

A: Ooh that’s a good moment to pick out

I was actually thinking about how vulnerable this book was making me as I read it

There’s that reading state you get into and it lets so much through

There’s a fantasy that can come with a written story that blurs lines of accountability and honestly just general common sense

I think maybe she’s been drawn under that kind of spell, she’s believing one version of this guy in contrast to the reality of his current behavior

M: I think I struggle sometimes with books about artists/writers/etc and it actually kind of locks me out of that open and vulnerable feeling I can get in a novel? It make me wonder who the book is for, a lot, I guess

Something here too about narrators taking a lot of drugs to escape from life, that life being the thing the book is illustrating for you, what the effect of drugged narration is – a brand of unreliable narrator, I suppose, but thinking about the shape that takes. There’s no reliable narrator in a first-person point of view, I revel a bit in a super young and openly addled narrator for being so clear about it.

A: That’s fair, I think this falls squarely into the space of Kunstlerroman mixed with the contemporaneously very popular genre of women behaving badly, a la Rooney or Mosfegh

So I think its for the girlies who can imagine themselves in this space

Plus I think there’s a woman who’s name must inevitably enter into this conversation

I think its a similar pull as the work of one Elizabeth Woolridge Grant

Age gap, weird devotion, party girl, tortured writer, surrounded by men who are intimidated by her intellectually

Very born to die

Very NFR!

M: Hahah I did have to google the name, pray for my sins

But yes

A: I googled as well, I just thought pulling her legal would be funny

M: Hahah love to pull the legal

A: The thing is that the narrator is, in the widest frame, the first person but from the perspective of the future more knowledgeable Nila

M: But yes cultural obsession with teenage girl too smart/sad for her own good

And with pairing that teenage girl with much older man who is on the downward fall

A: I feel like a lot of the naivete is painted with this but-now-I-know-better that feels like it undercuts some of the unreliability

Also the narrator is so immensely smarter that the average 19 yr old that I feel the drugged state offering maybe more of a tool to move through time more kaleidoscopically, if that makes sense

M: Yeah the present Nila being in control in that way paints a lot of the nightlife parts as less intense maybe because we know she is fine and then on the other hand paints the relationship stuff as very tense and ominous because it’s like well that’s what the story is about, that’s where the meat is gonna be

A: Also, I dont know I’m just desensitized from my own shit, but I just dont seem to find the stakes in any of this

M: Yeah I’ve let go of worrying too much about the narrative voice because I don’t know if I give a shit about realism and also I’m never going to complain about an intelligent narrator

Yeah I think the stakes are much more about her self-image & identity and not actually about the actions of the plot

A: I’m holding out that there will be some climax that combines her prospects in London with her family ties with her relationship and abuse

But that’s just me as someone who loves some good drama

Bc this whole thing with Doreen has (seemingly) been defused

I’m all for women not fighting over men in a novel, but like, let women be messy too, she said all that shit on the rooftop and then its never really addressed

It feels like Nila has no agency in the plot-at-large, and exists in this post-Cusk space of character who has conversations and reminisces on experiences when she did have a lot of agency but like that’s not what were doing anymore in the present moment

She doesn’t even pay for her own drugs! A bum! Of the highest caliber

As I ruminate on it, I think this is mainly just a gripe with the most recent section (pp. 122-183 for readers)

M: She thinks she has no agency – she literally tells Doreen it was an accident (!!) but it is all her making choices

She’s kind of obsessed with the idea that she has no agency because of all of those gender/race/class intersections but then in the next sentence is actively making choices and doing things. I think there’s something interesting happening in the tension between rules & agency. She is always tracking the rules for how things work because of who she is in relation to power structures.

Something that really worked for me in this recent section was from her repeatedly bringing up Marlowe talking about his mother’s death to her actually thinking about her own mother’s death, being upset about it

And notably after she dies Nila notes “those days, our usual rules meant nothing – [my male cousins] treated me as one of them.”

A: Actually, that’s pretty fair, it is that eschewing of accountability that gives off a feeling that she isn’t up to much

I wonder if the aged narrator is perpetuating that kind of idea or if its a reflection of that 19 year old attitude?

Also, yes, speaking of her mother’s death chapter 18 is another gem!

I think Aria really shines when she gives herself the freedom of those introspective flashbacks

M: Yeah some of the chapters are such glowing vignettes on their own

I guess that question depends on whether the narrator or the 19 y/o has control over the narrative

Fully cheering on pg 192 at her looking in the mirror & liking herself

“An unexpected desire for myself”

A: Desire is so interesting in this book

It feels like its often on a knife’s edge with repulsion

M: Repulsion and ruin

A: Hmmm yes

In italy there’s a lot of contrast between new and old, which within the lens of architecture that they give us the old translates directly into the ruin

Also! Point of order. Is this entire thing technically happening in german?

M: That’s interesting, also makes me think about how Berlin has relatively little old architecture because of WWII

Okay good question

Looking at first convo between her and Marlowe on page 12 I think yes it’s all German

A: Cause like, its germany, sooo

M: Eh actually no idk it’s hard to tell

A: But I guess that’s not super important lol

M: But I think safe to assume German

A: But on the architecture, it is interesting, because there’s the sort of treat of the prewar building they enter for the party where she crashes out

M: Yes reserved for this upper strata whereas she spends so much time describing the more modern boxy buildings of her neighborhood

“On our trip to Venice” – me immediately rubbing my temples like a disappointed grandfather

A: Oh yes

Yes yes yes

I got an honestly embarrassing amount of catharsis from the chapter before that with her friends, and then… womp womp

M: The chapter before with the friends is like an actual weekend of life I have lived while extricating myself from a bad situation – all the tones and colors of it, and there’s always a dog

Womp womp

Ok not to always get stuck on language and translation but on 219 she notes that she thought a particular thing in German

A: I was in therapy today

And was talking about my own little Marlowe

And she stopped me at one point and said “this person sounds like, and stop me if I’m using this term wrong, a ‘fuckboy’”

Which I think applies to this awful man as well very truly

Maybe even an understatement

M: Sometimes culture hits the nail on the head

Gifts us a term

A: Except as far as we know Marlowe does not fuck boy

Ooooh, speaking of which, can we talk about the sapphic chapter?

Or I guess the symbolism of Setareh in general

Bc, unfortunately, I want Aria to have a win, but Setareh is kind of just a flat mpdg

But I find her so interesting as a reflection of Nila’s own self perception(?)

Like that fox in that movie

Or the tiger in the other movie

M: Yeah it’s all very “compare how masculine everyone is”

I love that section as this look at the freedom of having someone in her life she can actually be her full self with. The freedom she’s sort of searching for in so much of the book?

The fox tiger of the self, yes of course

A: I want them to get together at the end of the book, but I doubt it will happen 😢

Your mother ever die and then you start having lesbian thoughts?

M: Truly could not guess where we’re gonna be headed with this ending

The gender stuff in this book is fascinating to me so much to unpack

A: Yeah, I have no idea, everything I thought was gonna happen has already happened, so now I’m like chilling

True but the sex/gender dialectic itself doesn’t seem to get interrogated much, mainly just traditional sexuality(?)

Wait, what do I mean by that

M: Yeah kind of not at all

Gender is a BOX in this book and we are in it

A: I guess I mean gender roles

Very much in the gender box

M: I mean the dang thing is titled Good Girl

A: There’s a drag queen at one point, not much other gnc rep, and like drag queens kinda dont count because its technically a job

M: Kinda very straight cis fictional Berlin club scene?

A: I think there’s an okay amount of lgb going on to be fair

M: I think the book’s a lot more interested in looking at Nila’s understanding of girlhood than it necessarily is in dismantling any of that, which is fair

A: Is it though?

Like, the call is coming from inside the house

She’s reading Arendt but has never touched Butler, I dont buuuy it

M: Hahaha yeah she’s got a starter pack here that just skirts that section

It calls to mind all the other contemporary fiction you were bringing up a couple days ago in relation to this

A: 🫣🫣🫣🫣

M: Of like I wanna look at how girlhood is intrinsically tied up in being harmed by men & seeking out that harm & etc etc

But I want to stay right up close to that and not reeeeeeally pull back enough to analyze it at all

Lol yeah I’m trying to decide how hard to go on contemp “women’s lit” rn

It doesn’t need me to come for it & this book is so tame about it compared to so many others

A: But also, nope, it was an *ethnic* identity crisis the entire time!

M: She literally texts all her friends coming out about it

A: It seems to be tied into specifically what it means to be a woman from this particular Afghan ethnic group

With the typical *cough* hijab snatching *cough* discourse from european women

M: Yeah which is being explored

!!

A: The one thing I will give this recent section is the way it touches on the ageless clash between “western” women and women from the Islamic world, from a holistic stance

Clearly the author flexing thoughts wrought from her actual living circumstances

Which I think is light years beyond the theorizing and what-ifs that everything typically devolves into

M: Yeah I think the book generally does a good job of staying away from theory

A: Erm, I wouldn’t go that far

M: Haha well

Aber is a PhD

A: Yeah

M: Academy folk

I was worried it would be so much worse I guess

A: This character talks a lot of theory, mainly literary or aesthetic

M: Well she’s 19 and atrocious [celebratory], so she has to

A: I appreciate that the politics and class theory of the 2000s is def lampooned

M: The “I’m sort of part time taking philosophy classes” is wild

Yeah maybe that’s what I mean more

Lots of other characters bringing stuff up and Nila shutting it down or literally tuning it out in the narration

A: Yes! She’s casually able to give a verbose weighing of Baudelarie vs Nabokov off the dome

M: But then the narration does a lot of its own theories of the aesthetic

A: I was gagged

I like that part!

The theory work Aria does in this book is packaged in a way I find compelling

One gripe I have is that there’s this meta-narrative criticizing the stupidity of cosmopolitanism and the mask-off revelation of the cosmopole as a diet apartheid state in the wake of the war on terror

(Mouthful)

But then Nila is just out her being a picture perfect cosmopolitan citizen, rubbing elbows with the “natives” and for the most part uncritically envying white people(???) But maybe that’s part of her arc 🤷

The subaltern is capable of self-awareness of their space within the cosmopole, that’s the whole reason it’s become largely ineffective as a strategy of social organization

This rant has been for the fellow postcolonial autists reading this, and the gays, thats it

M: Yeah I’ve been clocking some of that too and I guess I’m chocking a lot of it up to how she’s young and I think it’s very realistic for someone that age to be working through a lot of these big concepts & also carrying a lived experience of the “theory” but also not have unpacked it all or unpacked it “properly” yet or whatnot? But that brings us back to narrator Nila vs nineteen Nila and I can’t

A: Maybe she just doesn’t need to explain it to herself??

Which would make sense

M: Yeah

Different but similar to how she doesn’t need to explicitly explain the harm of this relationship

A: But the whole thing with the Afghan dogs had me screaming, that was actually some great stuff

The Zadie Smith jumped out

I think Nila is somewhere in femme pirate vampire

A: !!! So then where does she fall on the z axis? Do you think more prep or goth?

I’m meeting a friend today to see a reading

M: Ooh what’s the reading?

A: Jane wong is visiting the mfa here

Okay, so my favorite part of visiting writer readings is getting to ask authors crazy questions

Jane brought with her a chinese-english dictionary that her mother had been using to learn phrases in order to pursue divorce

And it made me think about this book, especially the part where Nila thinks about how her mother after immigrating was engaged with a state that wasn’t built with her in mind

So I asked Jane basically exactly that, how did she feel about state language and the strictures placed on her mother as an immigrant engaging with the american legal system

And she answered with something really interesting. A phrase that her mother had noted was “this is a slow process” because it was something her lawyer had kept repeating to her

And I just found that fascinating

M: Oh damn

God I love writers

That’s so good

I just finished, also

A: She just wants to be freeeee!

I was unimpressed with the ending. But the rest of the book makes up for it.

M: Kind of rare book where the middle really did it for me

A: The middle was so good

Relatively speaking

The Carson felt a lot harder to rate

This one pushes me to give a number

….. 😑 …… 👀 high 8/10!

Wait no

High 7

Low 8(?)

I dunno, I feel very outside of the target audience

M: Did you read Martyr by Kaveh Akbar or My Friends by Hisham Matar?

A: I read half of Martyr

M: Hahahhaha

Alejandro!

A: I put it down after reading it for a week straight

Then I lost all momentum

I might finish it this weekend

M: I have a lot of mixed feelings about it but I do think it’s grappling with some similar things & something of like the role of art in these political conversations about racialized violence

Maybe American vs European a bit

Sober vs very not

A: I did get that far most definitely

And what does it mean to die!

M: Akbar has done a lot of interviews where he talks about how one of his goals with the book was to take the numbers and statistics around death tolls and be like no every single one of those numbers is a full and entire human being with love in their life

And it makes me think of the scene in Good Girl where Marlowe is like oh I forgot someone died in that fire

Whereas Nila is like I will never forget that someone died in that fireSober vs very not

A: Marlowe has no convictions, but the book also seems to ask who the fuck can anymore

Which I think it eventually answers with, people who love beyond possession

M: Hmm yeah less pointing a finger of “you’re doing this wrong” and more throwing up hands in exasperation

A: Absolutely

She just wants to be freeee!

M: And answer in the moments of friendship she focuses on toward the end

And I think at the beginning of the book she thinks free means drugs&sex&”ruining her life”

A: Okay yes, a lot from Kafka!

She talks about his idea that those who stand for something actually lose freedom because they lose their ability to walk away from the belief

And I think she eventually realizes that ego/self-image is one of those beliefs as well

As well as the superego of tradition, the state, and idiot men

M: Ooh that’s interesting, say more about the ego/self-image part

A: So what I’m thinking is

And I think is common, though to vary degrees

This kind of learned helplessness, where we compromise with the world around us in small ways and as more time passes we begin to see it as a fixed piece of ourselves

I think there’s that part where she’s talking to Eli and he says that he’s skeptical of selfhelp bc it must assume that you like yourself as you currently are

And then they’re like, I wish I could change myself

And then by the end Nila realizes that the world around her is more than happy to continue as is with her under the wheels

And that kinda softens her up and wisens her

Coleridge kinda explains what I’m talking about in this passage about Hamlet

More

Another absolute banger

M: !!!! Yes yes

More than happy to continue as is with her under the wheels

Action is the chief end of existence

And kind of back to her obsession with rules and thinking through the rules and trying to act in a way that is shaped around them in some way but focusing so much on that that there is no action

And also the focus on creating an image, the difference between image/photo and representation

Something about how the successes and failures of the image correspond to the successes and failures of endless discourse

A: It feels vastly post-modern in its assemblage here, but a timeless foil nonetheless

I started on Martyr again I forgot how fucking good it is

The NYT review for Good Girl is 90% summary. It’s over folks. Pack it up.

M: Hahaha noooo to the summary. Have you looked at the interview Aber did with adroit yet?

I feel like I’ve utterly failed at actually saying anything about this book even though I felt it so deeply

Maybe the book is saying it so I don’t need to

There is something so fragile about groups of young people discussing what they believe

There is something about Nila looking at how photographs control a narrative, about older Nila narrating this whole story to us, and what is inherently left beyond that frame, but also the works of stories that hold themselves to the frame of one person’s understanding and reveal the depth of the world within that

A: Yay!

I think you’ve said a lot of good stuff and that is def one of them

It’s like framing a frame that itself holds a frame

Three layer frame

And within each framing we glean a different aspect of the person relaying the story

FIN

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Buy the Book

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Further Reading

• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin
• Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
• Nadja by André Breton
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
• My Friends by Hisham Matar
• Norman Fucking Rockwell! By Lana Del Rey
• The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery
• The Life of Pi, Dir. Ang Lee
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Ed. Sylvan Barnet
• The Lectures of 1811-1812, Lecture XII by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• A Conversation With Aria Aber by Emily Collins

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Alejandro Derieux is an editor at Big Table Press. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Mo Fowler is an editor at Big Table Press and has work out recently in The Minnesota Review and The Hopkins Review.