Luster Doesn't Shine

 

LUSTER (2020)

By Raven Leilani

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 229 pages

★ ★

 

 

Luster is Raven Leilani’s debut novel. Let me say from the outset that one day Leilani is going to be a major writer. She has an enormous vocabulary and crafts beautiful sentences. Luster, though, is not the work that will cement her place in the world of literature. It violates one of literature’s unspoken rules in that it has no sympathetic characters.

 

Leilani’s protagonist, Edie­—a name that is hardly ever mentioned—is young, gifted, and Black. She’s also annoying, unreflective, reckless, and prone to blaming everybody and everything for her circumstances. She’s the sort who acts as if the world is going to end if she’s not had sex in a week, which presumably justifies why she’s slept with most of the staff at the New York children’s book publishing firm at which she’s toiling at a low-level job she’s about to lose. That’s what she does instead of building actual relationships or actually trying to improve the skills necessary for the job rather than fancying herself an artist, a calling for which she has demonstrated minimal talent.

 

Put another way, Edie is a Generation Z mess. She lives in a crummy apartment infested with rats and roaches, has a mountain of student debt, and is lousy at conversation. Hers is not a life filled with Black rage, rather one of delayed social development and bad decision-making. The latter includes forays into soft porn and kinky sex. The novel is sometimes identified as a bildungsroman–one dealing with one’s formative years–but we don’t really get much of a sense of anything being formed. What would compel the 23-year-old Edie to have an affair with Eric, an often-distant white dude twice her age who has a wife and a daughter?

 

Because she has no boundaries, she crashes a party at Eric’s house in suburban New Jersey and insinuates herself into their household. As it transpires, Eric, an archivist, and Rebecca, a medical examiner, have an adopted black daughter named Akila. Rebecca cares less about Eric’s affair than expected and the two of them are willing to try Edie as a live-in nanny and teach Akila about being Black. The flaw in this is, as you might expect, triads are not so easy to sustain. Plus, Akila is savvier about life than Edie. She’s been fostered several times and has grown into her upper middle-class existence and the privileges that go with it. 

 

Some have remarked about the humor embedded in Luster. I’m not convinced about that. Leilani’s book touches upon too many serious topics for us to chuckle our way through. These include race, but it would too simple to identify it as the novel’s core. It’s also about the gaps between suburban and urban life, desire versus just sex, having money and doing without, art and artifice, and responsibility juxtaposed with immaturity. The key phrase, though, is that Leilani “touches upon” these subjects, which is all she can do in such a short book. At a key moment in the book Edie protests, “This isn’t my fault.” When Rebecca retorts, “The slogan of your generation,” I couldn’t but think, “Exactly!”

 

Luster is an ironic title. There simply isn’t much sheen or glow to Edie and an attempt near the end to give her luster is contrived and unconvincing. Were it not for those gorgeous sentences and Leilani’s obvious promise, this would be the sort of book one would read, shrug, and toss aside. Okay, I also liked Akila a lot and think a bildungsroman about her would have been a lot more interesting. In my view, Leilani’s next step is to pay more attention to characterizations and narrative arc.

 

Rob Weir