The New Gothamite Existential Drama

Raven Leilani, Luster: a Novel

Young Edie lacks direction in her life. She sleepwalks through a desirable but unfulfilling Manhattan publishing job, and despises her roommate. One day, desperate for connection with another human being, she answers a personal ad. That’s how she finds herself having an affair with a White man, twice her age, who feels stifled in his open marriage.

Front-cover copy calls Raven Leilani’s first book “a novel,” but that's somewhat misleading. It’s episodic, has only a vaguely defined through-line, and has more loose ends than a shoelace factory. Rather, it flows loosely, acrobatically, like a novel-length prose poem. Perhaps that explains the starkly divided opinions it has drawn from readers; your response depends on your willingness to immerse yourself in Leilani’s subtle undertow.

By her own admission, our first-person narrator, who is Black, has made some bad decisions. (She introduces herself as “Edie” very early, then never repeats it; she’s mostly a nameless cipher, even to herself.) She shits where she eats, has only a halfhearted commitment to her career, and frequently lets life happen to her. Accepting a wilful sexual relationship with a White man literally twice her age is painfully on-brand.

Appropriately, for somebody who spends copious ink regretting her past, Edie’s choices return to plague her. She loses her poorly-paid job, then her roommate, then her apartment. Trapped on a downward spiral caused by Manhattan’s “move up or move out” pressures, she caroms quickly through meaningless jobs, desperate for validation. To her horror, she finds temporary deliverance from the unlikeliest source: her boyfriend’s wife.

Leilani’s story moves forward, not by character or plot, but by theme. This perhaps reflects her narrator’s position: young, Black, female, and poor by city standards. Edie engages in ill-chosen sexual encounters, as much as anything, because they’re something to do. The novel’s title is deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the glamor Edie sees in her well-off boyfriend’s suburban life, but also her tendency to measure her life by sex.

Raven Leilani

Edie used to be a promising artist. But, like millions of art-school graduates, she shelved her talent when making a living became a higher priority. Finding herself suddenly sheltering with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s wife, the phantom of imminent starvation temporarily abated, she rediscovers the motivation to create. However, she struggles to reconnect that motivation with the part of her that sees like an artist.

Anybody who’s taken grad-school creative writing workshops recognizes this: writers frequently create visual artists as narrative surrogates for themselves. Given the limited amount of biographical info available for reviewers, it’s tempting to wonder exactly how autobiographical Leilani’s story really is. If this isn’t a roman à clef for Leilani’s life, Edie at least represents the author’s attempt to organize and comprehend herself.

Eric, Edie’s boyfriend, is a library archivist; his wife Rebecca performs autopsies for the VA. They traffic in history and mortality, which warps their ability to communicate. Eric fails to remain hip and relevant (Edie repeatedly stresses his GenX credentials), while Rebecca sneaks off to secretly mosh at all-night metal concerts. Their household communications happen in weirdly coded language.

Meanwhile, Edie meets Eric and Rebecca’s Black daughter. The meeting isn’t exactly amicable. However, they quickly become a force in one another’s lives: Akila has a creative spirit undimmed by years of adult cynicism, while Edie has life skills necessary to teach Akila how to be Black in a world still organized for White convenience. The pair need, but don’t understand, each other.

Readers weaned on conventions of mass-market fiction, of unified story and of action rising to a climax, may find Leilani’s style confounding. Edie is timid and adrift, more acted upon than acting. Her story is segmented and episodic, and while something happens that arguably serves the climactic role, it’s disconnected from most of what came before. Again, this is less a novel than a prose poem.

This is compounded because we wonder how seriously to take Edie’s narration. Edie frames events to exempt herself from blame, even though the story indicates she’s partly responsible for her frequent setbacks. Though she’s prone to lengthy monologs explaining her backstory, she presents them with the dispassion of an archivist, which, in context, is ironic.

However, audiences willing to immerse themselves in Leilani’s storytelling, to let the narrative current carry them along, will find moments of intense clarity. This novel isn’t for everyone. But readers able to pause their egos, and follow Edie along her strange, often opaque journey, may find more than a little of themselves in her story.