Review of LUSTER by Raven Leilani

 3 Stars

I picked up this novel because it has appeared on so many lists of the best novels of 2020.  It is even on the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me.  Perhaps I’m just too old to get the nuances of the story.

Edie is a 23-year-old Black woman.  She wants to be an artist, but is working in the publishing industry.  Actually, she is more focused on sexual adventures.  She describes herself as the “office slut” who has sexual encounters, “ingenious anatomical feats,” with “coworkers with elaborate, transgressive fantasies that I was dead enough inside to fulfill.”  She becomes involved with Eric, a fortysomething white man in an open marriage.  Rebecca, Eric’s wife, ends up inviting Edie to move in with them because she hopes Edie might help Akila, their adopted Black daughter who is lonely and isolated in their white suburb. 

The reader is supposed to have sympathy for Edie.  Having been raised by a mentally unstable addicted mother who committed suicide and a philandering father, Edie has little self-esteem.  She is trying to find herself in a world rife with racism.  But she constantly engages in self-destructive behaviour.  What makes it difficult to like her is that she recognizes that what she is doing is wrong but does nothing to correct her choices.  She repeats this pattern over and over again, though in the end she does state that she was a “silly, half-formed” woman who wasn’t aware that “being a woman of twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs . . . is the more remarkable feat” than being a middle-aged man with a “middling command of the wine list.”

Everyone that she encounters is unlikeable and behaves in baffling, unrealistic ways.  Eric has little to commend him, yet he is married to an intelligent, successful woman and has a mistress whom he often treats with indifference if she does not behave as he needs?    Why does Rebecca accept Eric’s behaviour? 

The style has been called unique.  Whether a reader enjoys the book may, to some extent, depend on his/her tolerance for run-on sentences with odd metaphors.  Here are some interesting sentences:  “While my father took women into his study, [my mother and I] descend upon the living room in Lycra for Zumba, eight-minute abs, or whatever lo-fi glute blasting was available via early aughts on-demand, alternating between tearful, formerly fat barre gurus, white capitalist body-posi rah-rahs with creepy yonic overtones, and the more classic motivational speakers who slap you over the face with a box of Ho Hos and compel you to squat.”  Here’s an interesting simile Edie uses to describe her embarrassment after being caught snooping by Akila:  “To see her there, the embarrassment open on her small face, feels like seeing an Olive Garden commercial after having already plowed through two bowls of fettuccini.”

This is one 406-word sentence:  “Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to not have used a condom and I’m looking around the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.”  As stream-of-consciousness, it doesn’t work for me.

There is humour in some of Edie’s descriptions.  She in her behaviour is not as bad as “factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean.”  She has received gifts from men, “gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets.”  As she gets on an amusement ride, she contemplates her death and “all my unfinished business – the quart of pistachio gelato in my freezer, the 1.5 wanks left in my half-dead vibrator, my Mister Rogers box set.”  But the humour is not enough to mitigate the negatives. 

I think this is a novel that readers will either love or hate.  For me, the book just fell flat.  As a senior, I am probably not the intended audience.  I can be impressed by the writer’s ability to construct breathless sentences, but that’s not enough to construct a lustrous book.