A few years ago, at a writers' conference, I happened to sit across from a famous novelist at lunch. At the time, I was writing a novel about Moroccan immigrants and was eager to confirm whether my completed draft had merit, and I wasted no time. But as soon as I started talking about it, the writer leaned across the table and told me in the weary tone of a seasoned professional: "Immigrant novels don't work. The narrative isn't interesting."

I sat there, staring at my salad, fighting back tears. In my opinion, this contempt for an essential part of the human condition is unacceptable. For a long time after that, I felt angry every time I thought about this summary dismissal. But in my better moments, I thought maybe what this writer meant was that novels of exile and immigration sometimes rely on predictable tropes: the shock of arrival, the inevitable feeling of alienation, the climactic scene in which the protagonist witnesses or experiences discrimination, Then, after a series of attempts, a moment of realization marked the successful, albeit unsettling, integration.

Like any other novel, the challenge (and, frankly, the joy) of writing about exile or immigration is finding new ways to explore familiar things. exist people like usDino Mengistu, for example, deftly subverts the trope of arrival by taking an American expatriate on a disorienting journey back to the United States. The invention of Jennine Capó Crucet Say hello to my little friend Using a captive orca at the Miami Aquarium as a stand-in for Cuban refugees trapped in a place too small for their ambitions. All of this is meant to recreate "the overwhelming feeling", as Edward Said once said, "a feeling of being out of place."

In her impressive debut, good girlThe poet Aria Aber turned to the bildungsroman, a form that allowed her to tell the story of immigrants' dreams of social progress while also grappling with the stigma that comes with such ambition. The story takes place in Berlin about 15 years ago and tells the story of Nila, a young girl who aspires to become a photographer. At its heart, the novel is about the temptation of freedom and alienation from others as the price of exile and artistic creation. If immigrants are outsiders, even "aliens," so are artists: many of us make art not because we feel well-adjusted and content with our lives, but because we are weird or curious or Be different.

good girl The story begins with Nila returning home after graduating from boarding school. Home is a squalid apartment in Gropius Dat, a "brutalist concrete nightmare" in a poor district of Berlin where her family settled after leaving Afghanistan. She was studying philosophy and art history at Humboldt University, “not because I wanted to study,” she says, “but because I wanted a free subway pass.” One night she met the American writer Marlowe Woods in a bar. Woods, who was well-known locally, having published a critically acclaimed novel and received an advance for his second book. He has a square chin, a dimpled chin, and piercing blue eyes. The red flags were obvious from the start - he was nearly 20 years older than her and always had the speed. Nila's attraction to him is direct and strong, unaffected by her girlfriend's appearance. Nila tells Marlowe that she is Greek, joking with him and making him laugh. The first part of the novel follows her pursuit of Marlowe's attention, which persists despite his initial indifference to her.

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Eventually, the two of them begin a sexual relationship based largely on drugs and depravity, a spiral so harrowing and so meticulously documented that it's almost hard to read. For Neela, Marlowe's attraction was more than physical or chemical; It's because he is everything she is not and everything she strives to be. He is American and has no burden of history, so much so that he can say of the famous bombing in Germany: "Well, that was ten years ago. Sorry, how do I remember that someone died?" More Importantly, he was a working artist, perhaps the only one Nila knew. She took photos wherever she went, but shame suffocated her, preventing her from grasping the freedom that art promised its practitioners—and that it demanded of them.

Why be ashamed? Because in Kabul, Nila's parents were both doctors. Karim and Anahita owned a nice house and had live-in help, but after the Soviet invasion in 1979, they fled the country using false documents. Documents and identification are particularly important good girldetermine the fate of multiple characters. Because they left Afghanistan under assumed names, Neela's parents were unable to retrieve copies of their medical licenses, leaving them unable to achieve the middle-class life they left behind. Anahita works as a nurse in a nursing home ("she's just a maid for the elderly") and Karim drives a taxi, just like his brothers - both are from Afghanistan and middle-class refugee.

Karim and Anahita consider the defeat of the petty bourgeoisie a failure and try to hide this in every way. If Karim has to drive a taxi, it's at night, when no one he knows can see him. If Anahita has to go to the food bank, she wears an old fur coat. Nila grew up with this inherited shame, coupled with the surveillance and control she experienced during her conservative Muslim upbringing.

Nila's shame at being Afghan in a world that dehumanizes Muslims is evident on every page. She carries with her the weight of a country she has never known and a language she is not fluent in, making her a stranger even to herself. It’s no coincidence that we only discover her real name six chapters later: Nirab Haddadi. She was overwhelmed by the pressure to be a "good girl" and began drinking and taking drugs. But her relationship with Marlowe, while ostensibly illegal, actually only reflects her relationship with her parents. The question is whether she can break free from this bondage and find the true freedom she seeks.

“I’m going to be a photographer,” Nila declares at the beginning of the novel. But in order to create art, she will have to face the chaos and confusion she has been avoiding her entire life. She can neither travel through time to return her parents to their country and social class nor change the fact that she is both German and not quite German. Art comes from accepting and celebrating everything that is broken within us. The act of taking a picture—framing the shot, choosing the appropriate aperture, pressing the shutter button—is literally the only form of control that Nyla has.

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All this is slowly being revealed. Arbor writes with the precision of an archivist. Each scene is carefully documented to maintain forward momentum even when told out of chronological order. There is a deep innocence about Nila - she is, after all, only 18 - and this inexperience is reflected in the cycle she finds herself in: Nila meets Marlowe, smokes ecstasy or cocaine or meth or ketamine, has sex An act, then a fight - not always in that order. This repetitiveness may bore readers, but Arbor successfully makes up for it through her impeccable prose pacing and inspired choice of detail.

Exile, migration, displacement: these can divide even the most solid self. But as Nila eventually realizes, as Abel does in this moving novel, it is possible to create art from fragments.