Luster
by Raven Leilani
Awards: Center For Fiction Winner 2020, Kirkus Winner 2020, National Book Critics Circle Winner 2020
Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2021, PEN/Hemingway Finalist 2021, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2021,
Date Read: June 22, 2021
Edie is in her mid-twenties and at sea in her own life. She drifts from job to job, relationship to relationship with nothing to tether her to the world. She is black, poor, and suffering from IBS but she’s beautiful, infinitely capable and artistic. Over the course of several months, she flirts and then meets in real life Eric Walker, a married man over twice her age.
There are rules, though. His wife, Rebecca, is aware of Eric’s proclivities and has drafted a set of rules to ensure their relationship doesn’t infringe on her turf. Yet, the rules keep changing until Rebecca changes them completely by having Edie deliver soup and a bone saw to her work, a medical examiner specializing in autopsy. Edie admits to her that she has nowhere to go.
Having been fired from her real job and evicted from her apartment, Edie finds herself taken in by her lover’s family – Edie and Akila, their black adopted daughter. Edie forges awkward, yet tender relationships with both girls, living in a sort of limbo where it’s never fully acknowledged that she is, in fact, living there.
And Edie does help this family in small ways – cleaning and acting as a buffer between Eric and Rebecca, babysitting. The help she offers to Akila when she fries her hair is sweet and touching and makes you realize how much more love and attention that 13 year old girl needs. But the parents are so involved in their own suffering and survival that Akila’s needs are muffled.
Leilani is brilliant in her honesty, however ugly and painful. I found myself stressing about Edie’s choices and thanking my lucky stars I am no longer in my twenties. Readers are swept into Edie’s orbit as she tries to gain internal and external acceptance as she stumbles from one bad decision to another. You can’t help but care about her and want to take her in just as the Walker family did. Don’t do it, Edie! Just don’t! Whatever it is, it’s not good for you and you can do better. You deserve better.
One of my favorite quotes: “So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.” Brilliant and so, so true.
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