On Raven Leilani's Luster: a novel
On Raven Leilani’s Luster: a novel
Luster: a novel by Raven Leilani; Jacket design by Na Kim; Jacket Photograph by Cory Vanderploeg. Image description: On a gradient color field which shifts from metallic red, to blue, yellow, and gold, there is a photograph that seems to be part of a person in profile, whose hair makes up the bulk of the upper half of the image, and whose sloping neck and back make up the rest. On top of this, in the same range of colors as the background, are the title and author’s name as listed above.
[Spoilers abound, if you care about that sort of thing]
I just finished reading Raven Leilani’s Luster: a novel (FSG, 2020) and it felt like a punch in the stomach. Another cliché for good measure: I devoured it in a period of under 24 hours. But it feels significant that both of my clichés are alimentary in nature, considering Edie’s (the narrator and protagonist) IBS which feels like it both is and isn’t a metaphor for her inability to fully metabolize her experiences over the course of Luster.
A friend lent it to me, but I couldn’t begin it until I had finished Alice Notley’s For the Ride, which was slow going but I finally arrived at the last page:
This langue’s fallin apart. Already, One? Words kin float around us
no-fish scales on the void. All the blessed. Pieces of chaos hum.
Not together, not tight but still stickin. Who are we? Not some parts…
I swear I’m not going to do that thing where I read one book through another simply because I read them one immediately after the other, but there is something interesting about having made my way through For the Ride, in which Notley rides out to the edges of English, anticipatorily crafting a grammar adequate to the other side of the apocalypse, then opening Luster and gliding frictionlessly through its exquisite sentences, each perfectly crafted and fitted seamlessly into the whole.
At various points in Luster, it occurs to me that this a book meant to speak to more than one generation. Indeed, to an extent it is a book in conversation with the contemporary fixation with generationality. Short take: I think this derives from the sweeping differences in class and, especially, class mobility between baby boomers and gen x-ers on the one hand, and millennials and gen z on the other, such that it can be easier to say okay boomer or to enact this exchange between Edie and Rebecca—whose context as lover and wife, respectively, of the same man—shapes their interaction:
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say.
“Is there anything that you do mean?”
“This isn’t my fault.”
“The slogan of your generation.”
“Why does it have to be my generation? Why can’t it be me, specifically?”
“Because you are not specific,” she says. “All of this, it has been done.”
I want to be clear that I think Leilani is attuned to the nuance, and that I think what she is depicting in terms of generational ressentiment is a reflection of what she perceives in what people call ‘the contemporary landscape.’
This is all to say that I wonder how much of the pellucidity of Leilani’s language, and some of her painterly touches, are born out of a desire to reach readers who see themselves reflected by Eric and Rebecca—that is, suburban middle-aged white professionals—rather than in Luster’s narrator Edie. And yet there are also way in which other aspects of Luster seem tailored to those who see themselves more in Edie, a twenty-three year old Black woman with a mountain of educational debt, fired from an entry level publishing job, who seems to be fighting a losing battle against generational trauma, the inhumanity of NYC to renters, ad fucking infinitum.
Maybe the primary aspect that makes this Edie’s novel is that Leilani has Edie tell it. Her inner monologue is the inner monologue of the most educated generation which is facing the most intense class stratification. To this is added Edie’s perfectly honed observational skills attuned to the world around her, its subtextual and social rules—even if she finds herself unable or unwilling to conform to them. Towards the beginning of the book, when Edie is still working for the publishing company, we see its artistic and publishing hierarchies and the ways that they are inflected with race, class, and gender.
Edie seems too defeated or disaffected to adhere to the professional script that is set out for her, focusing instead on the tangible if ultimately insufficient activity of having sex with an assortment of coworkers. By contrast there is Aria (“In music…a self-contained piece for one voice…” per some Wikipedia contributor) who, Edie observes, “…is the most senior editorial assistant. She is also the only other black person in our department, which forces a comparison between us that never favors me.” Aria, as we see her through Edie’s eyes is:
…doing that unthreatening aw-shucks shtick for all the professional whites. She plays the game well, I mean. Better than I do. And so when we are alone, even as we look at each other through borrowed faces, we see each other. I see her hunger, and she sees mine.
And again:
On her first day, she came into the office meek and gorgeous, primed to be a token. And as you are wont to do—having always been the single other in the room, having somehow preserved hope that the next room might be different—she looked around, searching for me. When she found me, when we looked at each other that first time, finally released from our respective tokenism, I felt incredible relief.
And then I miscalculated. Too much anger shared too soon. Too much can you believe these white people. Too much fuck the police. We both graduated from the school of Twice as Good for Half as Much, but I’m sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission. She still rearranges herself, waiting to be chosen. And she will be. Because it is an art—to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.
The only otherness of Aria in relation to Edie anticipates later in the novel when circumstances force Edie to take up residence at the house of her married lover, Eric, his wife, Rebecca, and their adopted daughter Akila. In this house, as at the publishing company, Edie is one of two Black women in an otherwise white room, but whereas Aria seems to see herself as being in competition with Edie, Edie is moved to help Akila, or at least to try to keep her from harm.
In Akila, Edie finds a girl on the brink of adolescence, a gaming cosplaying anime nerd, who has had foster parents before and doesn’t want Edie to mess up her situation, who is living with a white family and doesn’t have anyone to teach her how to do her hair or have ‘the talk.’ When the police who come to the door about a missing neighborhood dog and physically subdue Akila, it is Edie who is with her, reaching out to help and getting restrained herself, until Rebecca comes running up. It is Edie who plays video games with Akila, who helps her crossplay as an ifrit, and who brings the racism of Akila’s tutor to her mother’s attention. It is presumably for what she brings to her interactions with Akila, something Akila’s parents can’t give, that Rebecca begins leaving varying amounts of cash for her—as if Edie were an au pair and not her husband’s lover who had turned up at the house out of curiosity and stayed because she had nowhere else to go.
The way that Edie’s interactions with Akila are in some way anticipated by her interactions with Aria also shows up in the way that Edie’s affair with Mark, the head of the art department, is Edie’s most significant sexual encounter before Eric, and that both of them are authority figures. Of Mark, Edie thinks, “…it isn’t like the others—the ecstatic rutting and the cushy ether of the void. It is like I really need him.” And, “The sex is okay but sort of beside the point, because in his drawing room there are buckets of Prismacolors, Copic markers, and oils.” Because this is what Edie wants: to be an artist, and Mark is a bridge to a world with the supplies and the security that would be a fertile ground in which this goal could grow.
Edie’s artistic practice resumes during her stay at Rebecca, Eric, and Akila’s house, and especially takes off when she becomes pregnant. When Edie miscarries, as she is being sedated for an operation related to the miscarriage, she is asked what she does. She answers that she is an artist, and it is as an artist that she forges a brief and tenuous, but significant, connection with Rebecca, who gifts Edie supplies and brings her to the morgue to sketch and paint corpses as Rebecca takes them apart.
What else can I say about this novel? For one thing, why is the gun there? It feels like an in-joke for the benefit of ex-MFA classmates to flaunt the Chekhovian imperative that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must be fired by the third, and it just might be the only extraneous element in this sleek 227-page novel. Otherwise, I’m grateful that our access to Eric’s interiority recedes along with Edie’s just as he is becoming boring. A thousand Erics have written their version of this story, and we don’t really need another one. And there is a lot more that could be said about the sections in which Edie remembers her parents, both dead, and their relationship to addiction, PTSD, and religion. Rebecca’s job as a pathologist and Eric’s as an archivist, likewise, seem significant, but I’m leaving that for others to remark on at greater length.
Edie doesn’t live happily ever after—this is a literary novel, not a Disney fairy tale—but she is restored to similar material circumstances as at the beginning of the novel: a good-enough job, a tolerably shitty flat, excepting the transformation that she has gone through during her sojourn in the underworld of the suburbs. Her autoprosopagnosia shows signs of being able to be resolved in her ability to see and sketch herself, and the final act of Rebecca sitting for her ties a bow on her suburban sojourn.
My gut tells me that Leilani’s next book will probably be about a different set of characters, but as I linger in the postprandial glow of Luster, I find myself hopeful that, like Elena Ferrante in the Neapolitan Quartet, she will follow Edie through subsequent eras in her life. Either way, this debut novel shreds, and I eagerly await what comes next!
Some of the linked books go to my Bookshop.org storefront, and I get a percentage if you buy from there, but don’t forget about the library! I anticipate meeting you in the future where we don’t have to monetize everything to keep body and soul together!