Edie, the narrator of Raven Leilani’s vibrant, spiky debut novel, “Luster,” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 240 pp., ★★★½ out of four) is having a hard time adulting. She’s 23 and at risk of losing her New York publishing job, partly because of her office-hours promiscuity, which includes sexting with Eric, a married man across town.
It’s not that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. If anything, she’s all too aware of her circumstances. She’s an underpaid young professional Black woman with few prospects. Why not act out? So after Eric takes her on a date to an amusement park – oh, she’s infantilized too – she’s attracted, if skeptical. “There is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed 'Atlas Shrugged,'” she thinks. “Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.”
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Surprise: In short order, Edie finds herself effectively cohabitating with Eric’s family in their New Jersey suburb. His wife, Rebecca, is twitchily tolerant of Eric’s affair; they have an adopted daughter, Akila, who’s Black, and Edie soon realizes she’s been passively recruited into being a confessor, lover and ad hoc sister.
Leilani is such a funny writer that the despair of Edie’s predicament isn’t clear until she’s fully immersed in it. Leilani conjures up goofball incidents – Rebecca’s a cappella delivery of “In the Air Tonight” or Akila’s calamitous birthday party at a roller rink. But Leilani is a master of darker, more deadpan humor, whether it relates to Edie’s go-nowhere job (“If I fell down the escalator of the Times Square Forever 21 and severed my spine it would not make office news”) or her gilded cage in Eric’s house (“drapes the same shade of mauve my mom used to paint the kitchen the day she killed herself”).
As the situation destabilizes, growing uncomfortably thick with noblesse oblige, the metaphors get sharper: Eric “takes my face into his hands,” she writes, “and I can feel the salary in them.”
Edie’s defeated, I-can’t-even tone has become something of an institutional voice for millennial writers, especially women: Jia Tolentino, Patricia Lockwood, Catherine Lacey, and Ottessa Moshfegh have all merged humor with anger about the gender and economic inequities their generation faces.
“Luster” is distinguished by its focus on race, which raises the stakes for the story. The climax emphasizes that for all of her wit and flexibility, Edie is ultimately a Black woman in a white neighborhood. She’s treated as an assistant, then an interloper and finally an invader.
But Leilani is also a major new talent because her command of style and characterization is so strong. Tucked within the story of her life with Eric’s family are scraps of Edie’s own life, which emerge as she becomes more aware of her third-class treatment and her capacity to escape it. In that regard, “Luster” isn’t just a sardonic book, but a powerful one about emotional transformation. Edie shrewdly learns how to find strength in her jadedness, not just resignation. She becomes wise at “parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head.”
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August 01, 2020 at 08:01PM
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Review: A young Black women navigates a white open marriage in Raven Leilani's spiky 'Luster' - USA TODAY
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