An absorbing novel – the unravelling of Anna’s career and the increasing constriction of her relationship are gripping without feeling mechanically plotted. Anna’s struggle to be successful, loved and financially secure is lonely, but Crimp addresses these troubles, as they are specific to Anna’s generation, with a thin-lipped sense of humour ... I have a limited attention span for the pixel-by-pixel portrait of one person’s fluctuating self-worth, as when Anna eschews going to work in favour of taking mournful baths. But it seems reasonable to think that similarities in these stories expose something about the lives of young women now.
Crimp’s novel diverges from the Mills & Boon or Fifty Shades narrative it seems to be destined for — but only just ... Crimp’s prose is elegant and witty. However, despite the box-fresh creative-writing MA techniques of this diligently well-plotted novel, it never fully explores the link between Anna’s dark sex life and her other performative, physical job, singing ... This is a young person’s book, created and populated by girls whose understanding of the work of being female is not yet nuanced enough to bring it out of the shadows of Rhys, Elena Ferrante and all those other angry birds who have lived a bit ... This promising debut with its lashings of sex and music and good old female friendship is an exciting book for girls of a certain age and possibly a precursor to great things from an interesting new voice in fiction.
... enjoyable ... Like her protagonist, Crimp briefly studied to be a singer at a London conservatory, which may explain why passages set in this milieu are the ones where her writing — and her protagonist — find their strength ... There are plenty of stories these days about what it is to be a woman observed by the 'male gaze.' It’s a phrase Anna and her friends would no doubt use, if the at-times heavy-handed dialogue about tampons as 'capitalist,' or Latin as the 'language of the patriarchy,' is any indication ... In some of these moments, A Very Nice Girl is an all-too-real reminder of what it is to be a woman in your 20s, searching for who you are, trying on identities or stuck in a complicated pseudo-relationship even when you know you shouldn’t be. It’s a book about assessing your worth through other people’s eyes — parents, friends, a lover — and about being observed: by an overprotective mother, by men on the tube, by those who assess her auditions, by classmates competing for her slot, and ultimately by the audience. And yet, for the strength of Crimp’s writing, it might have benefited from a less predictable plot. Vulnerable young woman alone in a new city, seduced by an older, richer man who turns out to be kind of a jerk … readers may be disappointed to find there’s no real twist here — unless, of course, you count that Anna must lose the guy to get herself back.
... reworks Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934): the tale of a chorus girl and her volatile patron. How frighteningly easy it is to transpose that story; how tenacious – and tenaciously gendered – our scripts of romantic power remain ... But where Rhys leaves her heroine destitute, Crimp ultimately leaves hers empowered ... not a doomed love story so much as a self-love story ... Sex, on this view, is a trial that must be endured on the way to wholeness: an instrument of rupture before the inevitable repair ... There is something sharply conservative at play in all this obliterative fucking: not only the message that damaged women have damaged sex, and empty women have empty sex, but that whole women – healed women – aren’t sexually hungry or playful ... This erotics of productivity is a neoliberal morality tale. But there is also an older story lurking underneath it all, insidious and cruelly internalized: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, possessed of sexual recklessness, must be in want of a reckoning.
Enthralling ... 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 women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting.
[A] modest debut ... Crimp layers her characters with personality and crafts smart moments of humanity and observation...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.
