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Summary
Summary
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review , O Magazine , Vanity Fair , Los Angeles Times , Glamour , Shondaland, Boston Globe , and many more!
"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani's first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." --Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review
No one wants what no one wants.
And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we're ready to take it?
Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties--sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage--with rules.
As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric's home--though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.
Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani's Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life--her hunger, her anger--in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.
"An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy." --Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine
Author Notes
Raven Leilani 's work has been published in Granta , The Yale Review , McSweeney's Quarterly Concern ,
Conjunctions , The Cut , and New England Review , among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from
NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
Luster sails into 2021 on clouds of praise, vapour trails of hype streaming behind it. "The most delicious novel I've read," says Candice Carty-Williams; "brutal - and brilliant" opines Zadie Smith. Perhaps she would say that, being Raven Leilani's mentor and former tutor at NYU. But she's also right: Luster is both brutal and brilliant, and a debut that's sure to still be topping best-of-the-year lists in 12 months' time. Leilani's story of Edie, a broke 23-year-old black woman who gets involved with a wealthy older white couple, cuts to the quick of the often grim realities of being young and black in the US today. But it's wincingly funny, too, Edie's dry observational narration dissecting office, racial and sexual politics - and the way all three intersect, uneasily - amid the grind of city living and online dating. Edie is the sort of flawed female character we're seeing much more of in fiction and on screen. There's familiarity in her messiness: her attempts to fill the void with sexual attention, her devaluing and debasing herself and her body. But Leilani writes with such biting distinctiveness that, while Luster may feel extremely zeitgeisty, it never seems like it's chasing or overly beholden to it. This is an elevated example of the "millennial novel", swerving cliche. Pleasingly, Edie's relationship with the older Eric soon takes second place to stranger, subtler, more complex ones: with his wife, Rebecca - the cool, capable negative image of the hot mess that is Edie - and with their adopted black preteen daughter, Akila. Leilani's setup, manoeuvring Edie into their family home in New Jersey, stretches credulity, however, as do a few unlikely set pieces featuring the inscrutable Rebecca (dragging Edie into a moshpit at a thrash metal concert, for instance). But Leilani's prose mesmerises; you go with her, wherever she decides to take you. And she delivers many killer lines along the way, sharpened by unexpected details and cynical insights. On an inappropriate first date at a theme park, Edie feels "the high-fructose sun of the park like an insult"; her pre-date pep talk to herself goes "You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing". When Eric takes her face in his hands, she can "feel the salary in them, the 40-plus years of relative ease". Edie is especially cutting when it comes to navigating workplace tokenism, alternately playing along with or (more often) refusing the cruel charade of equal opportunity. She reluctantly invokes "the spirit of the Grateful Diversity Hire" when she's about to be fired from her entry-level publishing job for sexual misconduct. The only other black woman in the office, who's more cynically successful at this pose, scorns Edie for thinking "because you slack and express no impulse control that you're, like, black power¿ you're just exactly what they expect". But Luster can be soft as well as sharp; there's a luscious, elegant sway to Leilani's long, building sentences - especially around Edie's memories of her dead parents, or when writing about her painting. That passion is another thing Edie uses to feel bad about herself: "I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad." During her stay with Eric and Rebecca, Edie finally has the space and time to dedicate herself to her art. It's an uncomfortable reminder of the class imbalance in the relationship, but, as Edie reasons, "it is also demeaning to be broke". Leilani allows Edie this genuine blossoming through her painting, even if the peculiar economic circumstances that allow her to bloom - being effectively subsidised by living with rich white folks - continue to feel thorny. Luster ends with Edie successfully capturing the primary subject of her fascination - Rebecca, not Eric - on canvas. Yet she says she is "still waiting" for someone else to truly see her: "I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes." Of course, she has been seen: Leilani has painted a remarkable portrait of the artist as a young woman in these pages.
Kirkus Review
After losing her day job, a troubled young artist finds herself living with her much-older lover, his inscrutable wife, and their adopted daughter in Leilani's electric debut. Edie meets Eric online: She's a 23-year-old black art school dropout with a mouse-infested apartment in Bushwick and an ill-fitting administrative job at a children's publishing imprint; he's a white archivist in an open marriage and twice her age. "The age discrepancy doesn't bother me," she explains, keenly aware of the dynamics of these types of exchanges, his stability and experience for the redemptive power of her youth. Of course, she has been curious about the wife, but it's only after Eric goes silent that she wanders into his unlocked house and comes face to face with Rebecca, who knows who she is and cooly invites her to stay for dinner. Afterward, Rebecca leaves her a voicemail: "I enjoyed meeting you, let's do that again." And so it begins. Newly fired from the publishing house for being "sexually inappropriate," Edie is working for a delivery app when she gets an order for lobster bisque and a bone saw delivered to a VA hospital. The customer is Rebecca. The bone saw is because she's a medical examiner. The reason Rebecca then takes Edie home with her…can't be reduced into straightforward facts. Edie's role in their household is perpetually tenuous and always unspoken: It is clear to her that has been brought in, in part, "on the absurd presumption" she'd know what to do with their traumatized daughter, Akila, "simply because we are both black." So she bonds with Akila. Sometimes, she cleans. She is neither Rebecca's friend nor her rival. Regular envelopes with money appear on her dresser in irregular amounts, a cross between an allowance and a paycheck. And all the while, the dynamics among the four of them keep shifting, an unstable ballet of race, sex, and power. Leilani's characters act in ways that often defy explanation, and that is part of what makes them so alive and so mesmerizing: Whose behavior, in real life, can be reduced to simple cause and effect? Sharp, strange, propellant--and a whole lot of fun. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The first time she meets him IRL, artist/publishing professional Edie and her new paramour, Eric, spend a sweaty day at an amusement park. "After the first two rides, I am enjoying myself, and not just because dying means I won't have to pay my student loans." Their intense online connection, both sexual and emotional, was no ruse. They abide by the rules of Eric's open marriage, until Eric's silence impels Edie from Brooklyn to his cushy New Jersey home and the lukewarm reception of his wife, Rebecca. Somewhat uncomfortably attending the couple's anniversary party that night, Edie meets their adopted daughter, Akila, who's surprised to see another Black person there. As the summer wears on, Edie loses her job and her apartment, and moves in with the family, finding something approaching camaraderie with Rebecca, and becoming a companion for Akila. Leilani's radiant debut belongs to its brilliant, fully formed narrator. Old soul Edie has an otherworldly way of seeing the world and reflecting it back to readers, peppering experiences of past and current despair with acceptance and humor but never sacrificing depth, of which her story has miles. A must for seekers of strongly narrated, original fiction.