Anna is struggling to afford life in London as she trains to be an opera singer. During the day, she attends a prestigious conservatory and vies to succeed against her course mates with their discreet but inexhaustible streams of cultural capital and money. In the evening she sings jazz at a hotel bar to make ends meet.
It’s there that she meets Max, a financier fourteen years older than her. Over the course of one winter, Anna’s intoxication oscillates between her hard-won moments on stage, where she can zip herself into the skin of her characters, and nights spent with Max in his glass-walled flat overlooking the city.
But Anna’s fledgling career demands her undivided attention, and increasingly – whether he necessarily wills it or not – so does Max.
From debut author Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl is a bitingly honest, darkly funny novel that examines ambition, sex, power and love. A lot of similarities can be drawn between this and the works of Sally Rooney. Like Conversations with Friends, A Very Nice Girl centres around a young woman’s relationship with an older, wealthier man, and the resulting power imbalance. And like Marianne from Normal People, Anna is a smart, talented and insecure woman with a masochistic streak. Yet this novel is entirely Crimp’s own. In A Very Nice Girl, Crimp has captured what it is to be in your twenties, what it is to want to be wanted, and what it is to find your calling but lose your way to it.
The relationship between Anna and Max sits at the heart of this novel. At first, their relationship is merely a pleasant distraction for both characters. But things slowly deteriorate, and Anna begins to lose her footing, becoming more and more dependent on Max, both financially and emotionally, until she finds herself unable to do the one thing she’s supposed to – sing.
From the opening lines, Anna’s struggle for financial stability is painfully clear. When we first meet her, she’s living in a seedy attic with live-in landlords who measure the level of her bathwater and complain that she uses too much toilet paper. She tells people she’s on a ‘cleanse’ when she can’t afford to eat. Anna’s desperation to achieve both emotional and financial security while also juggling her career aspirations is absorbing without ever being overbearing, and Crimp manages it all with scathing honesty and wry wit.
In A Very Nice Girl, Crimp has crafted an intelligent and intoxicating debut that examines power, finance and class, all set against a dazzling opera world backdrop.
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