Member Reviews
This is a tough book to review. To start I’ll say I know that I am not target market or audience. This is very millennial / Gen Z which I am very firmly not. But unlike some books which can transport you back to being that person in their 20s I really struggled to do that with this. Maybe it was the definition of the older man being born in 1977 and I realised I was suddenly of that era, and not the era of our main protagonist.
Eddie is in her 20s in an unsuitable job and going from one failed relationship to another after a troubled childhood. She meets Eric, a forty something married man and starts an affair. After a night at his house when his wife is away she becomes intrigued about his other life and breaks into the house when the family are out. But his wife Rebecca comes back early... and finds her. From this point all normal expectations are out of the window. Rebecca and the daughter know about Edie already. And Rebecca invites her to a party... and to stay.
Messed up relationships are core to this novel. It’s provocative, it’s brutal, it defies convention. The characters are all flawed and aloof. And as a reader I felt it hard to warm to them. Dealing with poverty, class, race, loneliness and screwed up lives. This book really won’t be for everyone. But I know to some it will be everything.
Luster was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and it was better and stranger than i had imagined: its 23 year old protagonist Edie starts an affair with a married man, Eric, and then somehow finds herself moving in with his suburban family – his wife Rebecca and their adopted daughter Akila. i loved the way Leilani writes about edie's relationship to herself as an artist, and like a good character portrait, Luster makes clear that everything edie sees reflects back, shiny and ugly, Edie's flaws and nuances and soft spots magnified. She's messy and sore and immensely compelling, and her story is haunted, haunting, raw.
Edie and Rebecca have one of the most interesting relationships between women i've read this year, and I would've killed for an extra hundred pages of them just circling around each other. But then, the book is so unpleasant, so caustic, that it's hard to imagine it even being a sentence longer than it is. Any moment of tenderness or sweetness in this novel is immediately undercut by the scent of something rotten, which makes it Very Good and also Very Hard to read. Despite it having so many familiar elements, i've never read anything quite like Luster !
thank you to netgalley for this arc!
I found the book very intriguing and unexpected. For a book all about sex, it wasn't very *sexy* – but it was coolly anaesthetised in tone, and clever, and complicated. I enjoyed reading it and am glad to see it gaining so much acclaim.
I flagged it up in my round up of notable new novels on Five Books:
"...One debut that has managed to cut through the noise is Raven Leilani’s Luster. Out now in the US and Canada (but not available in the UK until January), this novel has been endorsed by the likes of Zadie Smith, Brit Bennett and Ling Ma, and highlighted as one of the most anticipated new novels of fall 2020 by everywhere from Vogue to Lithub. It’s about a young black woman working in publishing who begins an affair with a white man in an open marriage—then later comes to live with the couple and their adopted daughter in their family home. The book is an ultra-self-conscious interrogation of power balances, race, loneliness and non-monogamous relationships, and if that sounds intriguing you may be keen to read an excerpt published over at The Cut."
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I'll flag it up again in my forthcoming notable-novels-of-the-winter round up, for British readers who are waiting for release before ordering.
From the ‘For my mother’ dedication a dark humour infused in the pages of Luster. Disaster artist Edie is hanging onto her dull admin job barely, with 'a laugh that can spill drinks to the uninitiated'.
It begins with a description of sex in the copier room, Gen Z style and there's something Imminently readable about the haphazard narrator who offers highlights of her early life:
'The VHS of Spiceworld I received for my fifth birthday, the barbie I melted in the microwave when no-one was home.'
Eric is her sextor. When they meet IRL after a month of internet repartee it’s awkward; they’ve run out of material, but they carry on and Edie has carried on with others too.
'First dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl a white man dates.'
'I am not on the L, smelling someone’s lukewarm pickles wishing I was dead.
This candour is both Edie's calling card and downfall. Her slovenly appearance infects her attitude, she under performs at work, lives in squalor and practices poor personal hygiene, a cringeworthy unexemplar to her only other black colleague.
This wasn't a book without fast-forward moments, Chapter 4 felt like one long expo - the narrative drive hinge as nakedly exposed as many of the points on a character map you work on but don’t share with the reader.
Her life begins to unravel as her behaviour becomes less tolerable to those she encounters. I was a little suprised if she was in a senior position at work - there are assistants below her and she has manager in her job title - she is living in such poor circumstances. These inconsistencies pulled me out of the narrative and I found I began to care less about how she survived despite the raised stakes.
Around page 85, it gets weird and she becomes a part of an uncoventional family moving to live with Eric, his wife Rebecca and Akila their 21 yr old adopted daughter.
Like an episode of Broad City, Luster is clad in humour and high jinks, but lacked an emotional pull. There is sparkle to the prose but a less than lustrous endgame.
Luster by Raven Leilani is definitely the book everyone’s already talking about for 2021. It is about a young woman called Edith, who gets involved with a married man. While the basic plot is something I’ve definitely read before, the prose is sharp and urgent with sections that go off in a tangent that is rhythmic and hypnotic. Eric is in an open marriage, but his wife Rebecca sets the rules, and the relationship between the women becomes far more interesting than the affair that begins the book.
When one too many transgressions at work catch up with Edith, we see how quickly a life can fall apart with no safety nets: Edith doesn’t really have friends to speak of and her parents are gone and wouldn’t have been any help to her anyway. It makes sense then that this life, adrift from any safe places or people to land, could be subsumed by a more forceful entity, that of Eric’s family.
On one hand, I feel like I’ve read novels about lots of reckless, vulnerable women, often working in publishing or creative industries so this didn’t feel too new or surprising. However, the fact that it was about a black woman navigating primarily white spaces, and how she is seen by the white family as a natural resource in their raising a black child was really interesting to me. Edith’s throwaway observations about race and are really interesting, and often appear in her inner monologue as a stream of consciousness following a particular event, which to me are the strongest sections of the book. I’ll be interested to hear what people think of this!
Luster is a great debut, and was quite an interesting read. I’m a 23 year old black woman and in some ways I did feel connected to Edie, but I also thought the writing style made me feel detached from the story. You don’t really get to know any of the characters, and I felt like I was watching the story rather than being immersed in it. However, I’m really excited to see what the author brings out next - I think she’s someone to look out for.
"Luster" is a memorable debut novel in which Raven Leilani paints a portrait of Edie, a young black woman struggling with poverty, racism and autodestructive traits. She gets involved in an affair with an older white man, and a series of events makes her develop an unexpected connection with his wife, Rebecca. The author discusses various issues including being a role model to another black person, past traumas and their effect on your current life, sexuality and self-love.... Edie's narration is full of irony - black humour and sadness, her life unravelling before our eyes until she she hits rock bottom. The writing requires attention and in turn it rewards the reader with sharp observations and raw emotions.
Luster is an eloquently raw debut about loneliness, alienation, and the surprising intersections where we find tenderness.
Edie is a 23 year-old with a low-paying, unedifying job, sharing a Brooklyn flat with a family of mice and cockroaches. Her world is one of ugliness exaggerated to the absurd by wanting - her city is pungent and filthy, the men in her office faceless owners of genitalia. Online she finds and quickly disassembles herself to Eric, a white man twice her age in an open marriage. No longer hidden behind the intimacy of their screens, the affair is exposed for what it is. Between his sporadic declarations of love she is meant to discard, ‘suddenly it feels painful to be this ordinary, to be this open to him, as he looks at me and pretends I am not just a cheaper version of a fast Italian car.’ This attempt at being seen leaves her isolated as he retreats back into his marriage.
Edie then inadvertently inserts herself into his suburban, family life. She develops an obsession with his wife Rebecca, surprisingly reciprocated when she is invited to their anniversary celebrations, then to be a houseguest and guide to their adopted black daughter Akila. Edie flickers between intimacy and isolation with each of them, moments of bittersweet tenderness peppered in between quotidian estrangement.
Leilani excels at portraying the isolation of being black. There is Eric’s awkward over-enthusiasm and caution around blackness, the old woman constantly watching Edie from her window, the role of the token she slips into at work - and which type of token will she be? -, the police who question her and Akila and see a child’s confidence as danger. All of it ‘so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes’.
The book is brutally honest about the loneliness in love and the futility of intimacy. Edie considers Eric, ‘parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry?’ Later in one of my favourite quotes from the book, she thinks ‘of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.’
Conversations with Friends meets Ghosts meets Such a Fun Age! This book has so much to say - about relationships, race, adoption, family and our working lives. Honestly, I had no clue where it was going but was fully invested in the characters - extremely thought-provoking, a novel of our times.
I adored this. It was not what I expected in the best possible way. I adored the writing style and the narrative. Will definitely be re-reading.
Even though Luster is not out in the UK until January, it seems like everyone on social media is already talking about it - at least in my little literary bubble! - and rightfully so.
This is a masterful debut. Witty, beautifully written and so powerful on topics such as race, sex, body image and female rivalry. The plot is highly original and thus it’s quite difficult to compare Luster to other novels. The power dynamic between the wonderfully endearing protagonist, Edie, and the white couple she becomes involved with (Eric and Rebecca) play out in a compelling way, and if anything, I was more interested in the ‘friendship’ between Edie and Rebecca than I was in the violent, short lived sex of Edie and Eric. I also loved the couple’s black adopted daughter, Akila, and Edie’s mentoring of her.
Overall, a book not to miss.
What a beautiful book. Each word is meaningful and precise, an accurate reflection of the protagonist's thoughts and emotions.
The book is centred around a young, black 23 year old. Edie is a messy, messy person. She makes terrible (mostly sexual) choices at work, is lazy and is rebellious against the same system that seeks to oppress her. Edie gets involved with an older white man who is in an open marriage. All of a sudden, Edie finds herself homeless and moves in with said man's family. Said man's (Eric) family consists of his white wife, Rebecca, and adopted black teen, Akila. Race is a significant theme in this story, hence my emphasis on highlighting each character's skin colour.
The bond between Edie and Akila is heartwarming and really does show why it's so important for young black girls to have other black figures in their life. I was frequently left mildly horrified at Rebecca and Eric's complete disregard for what Akila so obviously needed. It should go without saying that if you are white and are going to adopt a black child, you need to do your research. The problem with Eric and Rebecca is that they tried to be good parents but in doing so, they didn't see how they could be good parents to Akila. It's not about being 'woke' or socially conscious but about understanding the individual needs of that child. So Akila is black, how are you going to handle her hair? Is she comfortable and happy in a predominantly white neighbourhood? This was clearly the point that Raven Leilani aimed to raise, and it is certainly an interesting one. It's a topic that was written about with nuance and in a considerate style.
Following on from that, I loved the narrative style and language. The total detachment of the language vividly conveyed how Edie felt. She is detached from everything in her life. She is detached from other black people, in fact from other people, full stop. She doesn't have any family. She is detached from her job, she is detached from all her sexual encounters. It's a very lonely life, and this is portrayed via the cold language.
At the same time, it was really uncomfortable to see how people treated Edie. Particularly in the case of Eric, he clearly seeked only to totally degrade her. Whilst Rebecca had more reason to treat Edie like shit, it was still done with such malice and passive aggressiveness sometimes that I internally flinched reading about a few of their encounters. On the other hand, their relationship was another weirdly endearing one. Rebecca did the best with what she was given, considering Edie is essentially 'The Other Woman' who is shacking up with her husband.
All in all, a wonderfully written book, which handles different topics not only with tact, but with a different viewpoint. One of my main issues that I come across and that I strongly dislike is when books become too preachy or don't offer a different perspective. Leilani shines a light on widely spoken subjects, but allows us to look into the conversation through a different lens. Final thoughts: buy and read this book! A brilliant debut from Raven Leilani.
A debut worth reading!
This is my kind of writing, sometimes uncomfortable but totally raw and honest.
I enjoyed reading about Edies messy life and painful existence and I look forward to more from this author.
‘I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men’
I devoured this book. It's written with a brazen honesty similar to Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and is clever and insightful about racial and gendered power imbalances in a way that reminded me of Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age. I think many readers will (perhaps reluctantly) recognise aspects of themselves and their youth in Edie, who is an incredibly well-rounded character – fierce and vulnerable in equal measure.
Luster by Raven Leilani starts off as being about a young woman having a fling with an older man but then it changes tone as she gets involved with his whole family. I enjoyed the central character's voice and would read more by this author.
This starts out like the usual tale of millennial professional and personal disaster (think Moshfegh, Butler) but it becomes so much more than that. That it’s Leilani’s debut is mind-blowing because it’s not only darkly hilarious (“You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing” was a favourite phrase of mine) but it dives deep into family, race, inherited trauma, art, death and more. I can’t be the only person who spent the whole novel hoping for Eric to disappear and Edie to get together with Rebecca instead. I loved it.
4 ½ stars (rounded up since this is a debut)
Luster is a deliriously enthralling and boldly subversive debut novel. I was dazzled by the author’s prose, which is by turns dense and supple, by Edie’s sardonic and penetrating narration, and by the story’s caustic yet searing commentary on race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Luster follows in the steps of recent releases starring perpetually alienated young women prone to bouts of ennui, numbness, morbidity, lethargy, and self-loathing. They are misanthropic, they often engage in some sort of masochistic behaviour, and a few of them inevitably spiral into self-destructiveness. In short, they are millennial Esther Greenwoods.
Luster, however, is by no means a carbon copy of these novels, and Edie’s distinctive voice sets her apart from other eternally dissatisfied protagonists. From the very first pages I found myself mesmerized by Edie’s perplexing and hyper-alert mind.
Edie is a recently orphaned 23-year-old black woman who leads a directionless and unfulling existence. She’s unenthusiastic about her desk job and with no friends to speak of she tries to allay her loneliness through sex (think Fleabag). After a series of ill-advised sexual encounters, Edie lands herself in trouble and finds herself staying in the home of Eric, the latest date. Eric is a white, forty-something archivist who is in an open marriage with Rebecca. The two live in a very white neighbourhood with their adoptive daughter, Akila, who is black.
Eric, who is clearly in the midst of a mid-life crisis, isn’t a particularly attractive or charming man. Yet, Edie is desperate for intimacy. Although she’s aware of her own self-destructive behaviour, she’s unwilling or unable to form healthy relationships, romantic and non, with others. Although Rebecca is suspicious of Edie, she wants someone to help Akila, someone who can show her how to look after her hair.
Edie’s hunger for love, desire, acceptance, recognition, and self-worth dominate her narrative. Her fascination—part desire, part repulsion—with Eric and Rebecca sees her crossing quite a few lines. The couple, in their turn, treat Edie in a very hot-or-cold way or use her as if she was little more than a pawn in their marriage game.
Edie’s voice makes Luster the crackling read it is. While Edie often entertains rather ridiculous notions, she’s quite capable of making incisive observations about privilege, race, sexism, and modern dating. Throughout the course of the novel Edie makes a lot of discomforting decisions, and more than once I found myself wanting to shake her. But I also really understood her inability to break free of the vicious cycle she’s in (which sees her seeking affirmation and self-love in the wrong places), and of feeling tired by just existing. I loved her unabashedly weird inner monologue and her wry humour (“She tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves”). Those few glimpses we get of her childhood and her relationship with her mother and father, deepen our understanding of why she is the way she is.
Luster explores the thoughts and experiences of a messy black young woman, without judgement. Like recent shows such as Insecure, Chewing Gum and I Will Destroy You, Luster presents its audience with a narrative that challenges the myth of the ‘strong black woman’. There are times when Edie is awkward, selfish, and angry. And that’s that.
Luster charts Edie’s sobering yet mischievous, kind-of-sexy, kind-of-weird, sad but funny search for everything and nothing. She both wants and doesn’t want to form meaningful connections with others, she both wants and doesn’t want to be alone, she wants to be used by others, she wants love. Her art is perhaps one of the few pillars in her life. She describes her paintings, the colours she uses, and the artists she likes (Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ gets a mention).
I liked the bond that Edie forms with Akila, one that isn’t uncomplicated but feels like one of the few genuine relationships that appear in this novel (although there were times I liked Rebecca, her intentions towards Edie were ultimately questionable). This is the kind of novel that thrives off uncomfortable truths, awkward interactions, and surreal conversations (that scene at the clown academy was gold). Edie is exhausted by the deluge of microaggressions thrown her way. She tries to be what others want her to be, which is way so many people use her. Even with Eric and Rebecca, Edie is fully aware of being a guest, that she can stay as long as her being there is convenient to them.
To be perfectly honest I find these ‘young women afflicted by the malaise of modernity’ type of novels to be very hit-or-miss (Exciting Times was a definite miss for me). Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl (a hit in my books), shares quite a lot in common with Luster. Both books centred on self-sabotaging young women who become increasingly obsessed with someone who is married (this someone leads a seemingly happy white suburban life), although in Pizza Girl our narrator is far more interested in the wife than the husband. Chances are that if you liked the deadpan humour in Pizza Girl you will like Luster. If you are the type of reader who prefers conventionally nice or quirky characters, maybe Luster won't be the read for you. Lucky for me, I can sympathise and care for characters who make terrible choices or do horrible things (see Zaina Arafat's You Exist Too Much, Rachel Lyon's Self-Portrait with Boy).
Anyway, I'm rambling. I loved Luster, I loved Edie, and I loved Leilani's prose and her punctuation (that scene that just goes on and on...wow). There were a few references or words that I'm not sure I entirely understood, and I have a feeling this is due to my not being American/native-English speaker.
Huge thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an arc. I will definitely be purchasing my own copy once it's available in the UK. Leilani, please, keep writing.
Luster is a striking novel about the myriad ways it is possible to screw up in your twenties and still survive. All of the four main characters are lost in different ways, and end up coexisting in a weird not-quite equilibrium. Edie, the main character is 23. Edie is quite promiscuous and self-destructive. She is holding a great deal of vulnerability about her lack of relational stability. When she starts an affair with Eric, Edie ends up entangled with Eric's wife and adopted daughter. They become a sort of messed-up temporary family. You know it will end in tears but you cannot look away. Four stars.
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Luster is a novel about a young woman trying to survive in New York City who finds herself entangled with a family after she has an affair with Eric, a white man whose wife has agreed to an open marriage. Edie is twenty-three, works half-heartedly in a publishing office, lives in a run down, infested apartment, and sleeps with the wrong men. After a virtual flirtation with Eric, a middle-aged white archivist, they meet, and go on a series of dates. He's in an open marriage and his wife has set rules, but Edie finds herself drawn into the family's world, not only Eric but his wife Rebecca and their adopted black daughter who has no one to help her navigate race.
This book is a gripping, sharp dive into Edie's life, cleverly providing commentary on the modern world and the realities of being young and black and having no direction in life, but also unfolding a complicated and weird interpersonal situation with ever changing nuances and rules, as Edie ends up in the family's home. There's some really fantastic images and lines, like her beating a pregnant woman to a subway seat or her experiences doing gig economy deliveries, and Edie is a vividly imagined character, from whom you get glimpses of backstory but mostly stay in the present. She can be harsh, but also sweet, especially as she attempts to make Eric and Rebecca's adopted daughter like her by playing video games and engaging with her fandom interests.
Luster is a brilliantly observed, well written novel about being young, about navigating sexual and racial politics, and about finding a place to be, even just for a while.
I loved this debut novel. It’s a slice of life story about a woman in her early twenties with a man in an open marriage. Their is a couple of very open door sex scenes but you could skip those if you wanted and it wouldn’t detract anything from the story. Thank you to NetGalley for this EARC.