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In an essay written for Vogue about her departure from her mother’s strict Seventh Day Adventist church, Raven Leilani writes, “It would take years for the questions to develop and still more time for me to admit that I had them: How could an omniscient being create animals capable of dissent and call it sin? How could evil and beauty coexist? We had been given free will and then asked for blind faith, but there didn’t seem to be a human alive capable of adhering to this absolute.” In her debut novel, Luster, Leilani dives into these dualities of the human experience, such as the coexistence of evil and beauty, free will and blind faith. The protagonist of the novel, 23-year-old Edie, inhabits many of these contradictions herself, she is a messy and fully realized black woman, still growing into herself and resisting the boxes that readers or other characters may try to put her in.
Edie’s 23-year-old existence is anything but glamorous: she is living in a crappy roach-infested Brooklyn apartment, working at a low-paying publishing house where she can’t seem to break into the more interesting areas of work, and her coworkers are constantly bringing her down. The main source of excitement in Edie’s life becomes her online, and then in-person, affair with Eric, a middle-aged white man living in suburban New Jersey with his wife and adopted daughter, experimenting with an open marriage. The two have a great deal of anticipatory sexual chemistry, but not much actual physical chemistry: their relationship feels like elaborated foreplay with uneven power dynamics. Edie is attracted to Eric because of the security and comfort that he possesses, which feels like the opposite of her position in life. When Edie and Eric have sex in Eric’s family home, a chain of events is set off that eventually brings Edie to Eric’s wife Rebecca, who strikes up a very complicated friendship with Edie and eventually asks her to move into the New Jersey home. Edie moves in, and begins her strange dance with Rebecca, avoiding each other at times and at others engaging, all the while Rebecca and Eric’s adopted black daughter Akila becomes more comfortable with the visitor in the house.
The relationships between these three women—Edie, Rebecca, and Akila—become the novel’s focus, as Eric moves out of view, revealed to be mostly uninteresting. The novel is in many ways about what it means to be a mother or a caretaker, as Rebecca by all appearances is a competent mother, but struggles to connect for her adopted daughter, and Edie becomes more of a caretaker to Akila, despite the fact that Edie often has a lot of trouble taking care of herself. The imperfections of these three women, who purposely or not harm each other in different ways, also bring out strikingly beautiful things in each other. Edie helps Akila not only with things like maintaining her black hair, but participates in and encourages her interests in gaming, comic books, and nerd culture. In Rebecca’s house and with her encouragement, Edie begins painting again, a passion that she had not been actively exploring in her young life, unable to find any inspiration. The women inspire each other both to create and destroy, and plumb the depths of what it means to exist to coexist, to “be affirmed by another pair of eyes”, as Edie says.
Luster is a quest for belonging, and while it’s written with the wit and sharpness of other millenial novels like Normal People or The New Me, it separates itself with a tenderness toward its characters, toward the experience of young black women trying to find a place in a violent world. For example, Edie is conscious of her temporary place in Akila’s life, “I know her life has been shaped principally by the sudden departure of people she trusts, and I am not going to buck the trend.” But nevertheless she commits to sharing herself with this child, to offering her an alternative to loneliness and alienation. Edie is also conscious of the transactional relationship she has with Rebecca and Eric, but is forced to prioritize her own survival over complete comfortability. Leilani is always peering deeply into the souls of her female characters, attempting to capture their complexities and motivations.
In her review of the novel for Harper’s Bazaar, Zadie Smith wrote, “Raven’s novel made me feel less alone and so excited about the future, both for her as a young Black writer and for the many readers she is surely soon to gain.” Excitement is perhaps the perfect word to describe the experience of reading this novel, which is at once funny and terrifying, immensely propulsive, and heart achingly beautiful. This novel is a promise of only great things to come, and already feels like the standard-bearer for contemporary fiction writing. As only the most wonderful novels are, this is a stroke of pure talent and exquisite craftsmanship, and a brave effort to reach right into the chests of its readers.
Further Reading: If you enjoyed this novel, you’ll find similar wit and incision in the writing of one of Leilani’s mentors, Zadie Smith. Start with White Teeth or Swing Time. If your’e craving more of Leilani’s work, her essays like this one for Vogue are incredible, and very much inform her novel.