Luster by Raven Leilani
Edie is having a difficult time navigating her 20s. She shares a shoddy Bushwick apartment, clocks in and out of her admin job, and makes a number of unwise sexual decisions. She is also haltingly and erratically heating and ventilating the artistic simmering within her. After that, she meets Eric, a digital archivist who lives in New Jersey with his family, including his wife, an autopsy who has consented to an open marriage with restrictions.
Edie finds herself jobless and accepted into Eric’s home—though not by Eric—as if negotiating the continuously shifting landscapes of modern sexual manners and racial politics weren’t challenging enough. She turns becomes his wife’s reluctant ally and his adopted daughter’s de facto role model. Young Akila might not know any other Black women beside Edie.
Raven Leilani’s Luster is a depiction of a young woman attempting to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a turbulent era. It is irresistibly wild and brilliantly beautiful, razor-sharp and subtly funny, sexually charged and completely captivating. It also gives a frightening, heartbreaking account of how difficult it is to have faith in one’s own abilities and the unforeseen forces that help us discover ourselves along the journey.
Luster by Raven Leilani
63 used from $2.65
Amazon.com
Luster by Raven Leilani is one of the most inventive and outstanding debut books I’ve ever read. It offers the first-person narrative of Edie, a Black painter of 23 years old. She spends the entire book failing to complete self-portraits in the same way as she fails to organize her life. Painting serves as a metaphor for Leilani’s endeavour to “reproduce an unfathomable thing”—Edie and her story—as well as for Edie’s yearning to make sense of her life. Edie does create a painting in the book’s concluding portion, but it is not of herself but of Rebecca, her boyfriend Eric’s wife.
A fair way to describe what Edie accomplishes throughout the story is to call it “survival.” There is no teleology or beginning or end to survival. Perhaps this is what gives the plot its peculiarity. The three main characters appear to act almost aimlessly. Edie meets Eric online and falls into a sexual relationship with him, not consciously choosing to do so. This explains the shocking first line of the book, which begins, “The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our workstations during working hours, bathed in blue computer light.” Similar to Edie, Rebecca and Rebecca end up in a platonic relationship that leads to Rebecca inviting Edie to live with her when Eric is away on business. Neither woman ever adopts a firm stance against the other.
