Raven Leilani's Sexy-Smart Novel "Luster" Will Have You Fanning Yourself
Edie, the capricious millennial narrator of Raven Leilani’s strikingly observed debut novel, Luster, first encounters her lover—23 years her senior—in the flesh at Six Flags. They’d met online, connected on Instagram, but they start their affair for real at a theme park “surrounded by the most rococo trappings of childhood.” Eric’s life is established. “I have been married to the same woman for thirteen years,” he says, “and our graves are right next to each other.”
Meanwhile, Edie is in flux: She’s dogged by Sallie Mae, tenuously employed at a children’s book publisher. He’s white, she’s Black, and he and his wife have adopted a Black daughter. What ensues over the next 200-plus pages is indeed a wild ride: an irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.
Leilani, a painter like her protagonist, has a masterful eye for detail. When Edie, who rents a run-down Brooklyn apartment, sees Eric’s house in a tony New Jersey suburb (“a realm where sticker price is incidental data”), she notices the “fruity dental office artwork, the shelves of crystal, the unsmiling shot of Eric and Rebecca in the ruins of Pompeii.” Rebecca, the wife, is a medical examiner who performs autopsies to the tune of Hall and Oates’s “Rich Girl” and condones her husband’s infidelity. Edie herself yearns for a worldlier, more grown-up existence yet prefers Peppa Pig toothpaste.
But it’s not until Edie is fired and Eric and Rebecca invite her into their family as a surrogate mentor/au pair that the affair, which began as a side attraction, becomes the main event. Leilani paints a complex, gloriously messy portrait of three people pushing boundaries.
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