A Very Nice Girl

September 1, 2021

Aspiring opera singer Anna studies at an elite London conservatory by day and supports herself by singing jazz at a ritzy bar by night, finding relief from the stress in her budding relationship with cool, wealthy, just-divorcing financier Max. Soon, though, she is caught between him and her career. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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January 3, 2022
Crimp’s modest debut follows a cash-strapped London opera student who gets in a bit too deep with an older man. Anna, 24, falls for 30-something Max after he chats her up at a bar. Though they keep the relationship casual at first, Anna begins to spend more time with the cagey Max, who works in finance and reveals little about himself other than the fact that he is separated from his wife. Soon, Max sets her up in an apartment of her own and gives her money so she can quit her side jobs, and she starts blowing off lessons and rehearsals to be at his beck and call. Anna continues to drift away from her art until an audition before a panel of creepy older men traumatizes her to the point of not being able to sing at all. Crimp layers her characters with personality and crafts smart moments of humanity and observation (“there was nowhere obvious for me to stand,” Anna narrates tellingly of an awkward audition), yet the story hinges on well-worn, predictable tropes of romance, dependency, and the struggling artist. As a result, it’s too easy to see where things are headed. Crimp’s characters, while memorable, cannot escape a garden-variety plot.

February 1, 2022
Crimp's nuanced debut novel examines life as a female artist and the power dynamics in relationships. Anna is studying opera at a conservatory in London and living in dreary rented rooms with her friend Laurie, a writer. She sings jazz at a hotel bar to supplement her scholarship. Singing is the only thing Anna wants to do, and she remains at the conservatory despite the competitive atmosphere and the contrast between her wealthy classmates' lifestyle and her own. One night at her jazz gig, she meets and begins a relationship with Max, a banker 14 years her senior. When a chance to audition for a festival in Paris puts Anna in a financial bind, she asks Max for a loan. Slowly he begins paying for more, suggesting Anna give up jazz singing and move out of her shared apartment. As Max's influence on Anna grows, she begins shaping her life around his. Crimp, a trained opera singer, offers absorbing, rich prose that brings dramatic scenes to life and illuminates delicate manipulations in a controlling relationship.

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Starred review from December 15, 2021
An aspiring soprano is thrown off course by a tempestuous affair with a wealthy, mysterious older man. To support herself as she studies on scholarship at a prestigious conservatory in London, hardworking, anxious Anna works as a jazz singer in the hotel nightclub where her uninhibited, popular best friend, Laurie, an aspiring writer, is a waitress. At first the women live in a hovel run by live-in landlords who measure the level of their bathwater and spy on them relentlessly; later they move into an "experiment in communal feminist living" where dinner topics include whether pornography is inherently misogynistic and why straight White men don't care about climate change. As the book opens, Anna meets an older customer named Max, whose teasing, hard-to-read response to her charms gets hooks into her fast. Crimp's enthralling debut plunges forward from that night, Anna's confession tumbling out as if on waves of breath, dialogue recounted without quotation marks adding to the effect. At first, she is able to balance her fixation on Max, who is both exceedingly generous and frustratingly withholding, with her commitment to her voice ("the voice," as this crowd thinks of it). She adores her mentor, Angela, a well-known soprano who is preparing her with the utmost rigor for the demands of a cutthroat profession. A big break comes when the woman who is singing Manon gets laryngitis on closing night and Anna, her understudy, gets to show what she can do. In several wonderful passages, Crimp takes us inside Anna's head as she performs, singing her way through the emotional trail markers of the libretto--inevitably suggesting certain resonances with her own affair. As Anna summarizes the classical opera plot: "He did x to me. He did y to me. I never got over it." Did he, though? Cleverly, Crimp never pins down exactly what Max did and what Anna projected; you can read things two ways right through the end. A Rooney-esque exploration of power and class in young women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting.

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