Luster by Raven Leilani
Review by Chelsey Kimberly
I don’t read a lot of Millennial fiction, or I should say I haven’t yet. Despite having an MFA in fiction, I’ve been ignorant of the conventions of my would-be cohort. So starting into Luster, I was immediately struck by its slick, contemporary style. Anything smacking of stage-direction has been lopped away; different settings and days converge seamlessly like items on a sluicing phone screen. Leilani’s control of the prose is tight, Edie’s internal monologue ruthless, auteur, stealthily tender, cinematic, sprinkled organically with stumbled-upon reminiscences of trauma and loss: flashings of a mentality in quiet crisis, bracing for some sort of revolution—all suffused with the florid nostalgia of disco music. Sentences are transporting and expansive, evocative through incisive particularity.
The longer I was in Edie’s thoughts, the more I prayed the breaking point would treat her well. But, the deeper we immersed into Eric, Rebecca, and Akila’s household, the more distant the surface seemed. I didn’t see how Edie could successfully extricate herself from this “entanglement”; the churnings of psychodrama felt so keen, even slightly addictive. I couldn’t quite picture her moving onto another phase of her life, one possibly as emotionally vacant as her stasis before she meets Eric and, through him, Rebecca and Akila. How could it be, I came to wonder, that a scenario that seemed so tenuous—living as a fugitive from white capitalist cishetereopatriarchy in the very tenderloin of white capitalist cishetereopatriarchy, the wealthy white suburbs, on an iconoclastic yet emotionally unsustained relational premise—was the exact situation that would allow Edie to rebirth herself?
The only thing that kept me from getting lost in the dreamlike yet paradoxically prosaic landscape of the household was the candor of Edie’s sometimes sardonic, sometimes weary, sometimes confessional internal monologue. If this type of affect is typical of this type of fiction, Edie’s jadedness, the old feeling of her soul, felt qualified by the outline of her life experiences. I trusted her to know her opinions of the world, even when her judgment of a situation or action differed from mine.
Style aside, in my mind Luster is kindred to Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, in its content and in my feeling toward it. Both books are about young Black women, young, artistic women of West Indian heritage coming of age in New York City: Marshall’s Selina is a dancer, Leilani’s Edie paints, and both are lonely in different ways. Where Selina struggles with the gap between her self-understanding and the way that both white society and her natal Barbadian immigrant community see her, Edie struggles more with her ability to recognize and embrace her own self, down to literally attempting self-portraits by painting different objects, nooks, and corners found around Eric and Rebecca’s home. Toward other Black women, she is ambivalent yet yearning, an admixture that felt familiar to me and I imagine would to other Black woman readers who’ve been shaped by white adjacency, respectability, and other ideologies that discourage Black women from, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, looking one another in the eye. To fully recognize one another would be to fully recognize ourselves—flaws, wounds, strengths, and all. This is vulnerability, and that can be harrowing in a world that’s betting against us, even impossible-feeling.
Selina’s story ends, and begins anew, with her excommunication from her community, having rejected the scholarship they struggled to raise for her because she knows her identity no longer aligns with their expectations of her. Edie’s hinges on a similar break of clarity: her entanglement with Eric, Rebecca, and Akila is over; she is able now to better see herself, her past, her present, what she wanted out of Rebecca and Eric—the entire situation.
Where I closed Brown Girl, Brownstones with a bittersweetness for all that Selina had both lost and given up, with Edie, I felt a shy sense of triumph. The novel’s adrenalized final paragraph embodies the self-midwifery that Black women have been undertaking for generations, regardless of the recognition or appreciation of those around us. When we turn a loving and sustained gaze inward, we create worlds:
“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m done, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
It is hard not to feel Leilani’s breath right behind Edie’s, the words applying just as much to her own accomplishment of representation that is Luster.
Though Edie is lonesome, laden, and lost, throughout the book she longs not just for purpose but artistry—and, as she by book’s end realizes, she’s been just cliché enough to go as many have gone before her and have an affair with an older (white) man who is not just likely but engineered to disappoint her, and badly. However, Edie doesn’t confuse her sexual and her creative frustrations, her desire for someone to fuck her with her desire for living itself: she understands that Eric can only feed one of her hungers. Her mistake is believing, even when she says she doesn’t, that Eric could do anything in the way of loving her. Instead, they fuck edgily while a.) Edie builds peculiar yet honest relationships with Akila and Rebecca and b.) Eric vacillates on whether he sees Edie as a real person or nah (he is very clear, however, on not wanting Edie to see him as a monster).
Everybody’s consenting…but shit’s still weird. And it’s hard to take in the particulars of Edie’s sexual-domestic entanglement with Rebecca and Eric without considering the afterlife of U.S. American chattel slavery—and in fact an Afropessminist perspective encourages one to do just that. In addition to the historically resonant cross-racial sexual dynamics evoked by Luster, enslaved people systemically endured sleep interruption for forced sex, manual or domestic labor, surveillance, and other dehumanizing purposes. In her memoir, Harriet Jacobs described such nocturnal psychodrama involving her “mistress”:
“She now took me to sleep in a room adjoining her own. There I was an object of her especial care, though not to her especial comfort, for she spent many a sleepless night to watch over me. Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer.” (24)
Id est, sexual competition and jealousy played out in the domestic sphere.
Like the light of the disco ball that falls (magnificently) into the roller-skating Akila’s hands, Luster fragments and re-infuses these tropes, giving them back to us to recognize and understand anew. It is Edie transgressing into the sanctity of Rebecca and Eric’s night; Edie purloining gratification (and inspiration) through voyeuristic advantage, Edie consenting to trysts with a married white man, sneaking around the house behind his wife’s back.
The archetype of the white (Southern) slave mistress has her gaslit by her rapist husband, whom she suspects of “sleeping with” slaves, the arrival of light-skinned babies sometimes proving as much. Meanwhile her husband’s lies cudgel her perception of reality to distortion, and probably, she takes it out on the enslaved. But theirs was a conflict of misrecognition, the mistresses: mistaking rape for sex, victims for seductresses, craven sadists for bewitched husbands. Again, Luster is subversive: it’s Rebecca who recognizes Edie more than anyone—both in regards to Edie’s dealings with Eric, and her general reality as a person. It is Rebecca who’s sleeping on Edie’s floor; who learns about and in her way responds to the traumas of Edie’s past; who presents Edie with opportunities for growth and experimentation far more tailored than her affair with Eric: “All of this, it has been done,” Rebecca says—speaking as much of her own role in the entanglement as anything else. Here, she almost echoes Jacobs’ reflection on her mistress: “Mrs. Flint possessed the key to her husband’s character before I was born” (Leilani 192; Jacobs 22).
Likewise, Rebecca is and has been aware of Eric’s mediocrity in ways that Edie couldn’t fathom. You wonder how long it will be before she announces that their marriage is also “no longer serving [her]”—a prospect that (purposefully, it seems) loses its easy feminist shine when you consider what effect such a change would have on Akila (192). At any rate, unlike Mrs. Flint, who, as Jacobs politely points out, “might have used this knowledge” of her husband’s shittiness “to counsel and screen the young and the innocent,” Rebecca does have “sympathy” for Edie (22). However, certain incidents stress the implicit inheritance of toxic patterns around whiteness and femininity nevertheless, such as when Rebecca, whom Edie suspects is aware of her and Eric’s wanton sexual congress throughout the house, “loses” her wedding ring in order to convince Eric to buy her a new, more expensive one; or when Edie catches her being flirtatious with Akila’s racist teenaged tutor, Pradeep (177).
Indeed, the afterlife of slavery manifests not just as sexual competition proper, but intersecting dynamics of jealousy and collaboration when it comes to matters maternal: as Jessie Parkhurst wrote of the "mammy's" role in the Southern plantation household, mistresses and enslaved Black women in the mammy role sometimes assumed a "freedom of intercourse" regarding the white woman's children and domestic issues that was unique in this highly racialized, highly codified context. Similarly, white people raised in such configurations sometimes felt just as deeply, if not more so, toward the Black women who did much of the work of raising them as they did toward their often more removed biological mothers. While hardly a facsimile, one feels the ghost of these dynamics in Luster through the theme of adoptive parenting—especially when Edie advocates for Akila by calling out Pradeep's racism, to the point of Rebecca's deep (and rare) discomfort: "'I am her mother,' she says firmly, though there is a hitch in her voice and her face colors. 'You are a guest'" (Leilani 120).
Rebecca is the cipher of the novel—part foil to and part doppelgänger of Edie’s also enigmatic mother—her emotional state at once elusive and impelling. I recognized deeply the instability between certain white and Black women drawn to, or otherwise caught up in, each other, the cracklings and sparks of mis/recognition mixed with shame mixed with sometimes outlet-less empathy. Rebecca’s Tina Kenard-esque personality, her “freaky competence” and frankness to the point (somehow) of obfuscation, accentuates the mysteries of an archetypal, non-white supremacist, non-Karen white woman from the perspective of an archetypal Black woman who is indeed open to intimacy across racial lines (121). Luster thereby conjures perennial questions about the viability of interracial romance, friendship, community, kinship (through the adoption theme as well), and coalition building, especially among non-cis men. In this, I see affinity between Leilani’s and Cheryl Dunye’s work—which is telling, since the question of erotic attraction between Rebecca and Edie remains, true to definition, undefined. The nude portrait Edie makes of Rebecca in her new apartment at novel’s close is at once a flipping of the power script and a lack that lingers: “When she doesn’t protest, I arrange her into the position I want, one limb at a time, until she is taut. There is no coy, lingering touch, though I can feel her expectation of me when I press an arch into her back…” (226).
The offbeat eros of this moment is not incidental to but expressive of the rebirthing that Edie undertakes over the course of the book. In a way that feels as messy and crunchy as things in actuality are, Rebecca and Eric’s upper-middle class white suburban household becomes an arena for Edie to interrogate her demons, though not exorcise them. What she needs isn’t to be saved but to be known and loved. Like Rebecca, Edie neither perfectly echoes nor perfectly subverts her interpolative antecedent. She chooses a relationship with Eric, a man who has social, racial, gender, and economic advantage over her; whether she also chooses the increasingly degrading outbursts of violence he visits upon her—a hand squeezed around Edie’s neck, a slap to her face, a directive that she say “I have nowhere else to go” in order to make him come—is a more complicated question (180).
In fact, during their impromptu relationship postmortem while Eric is tripping on shrooms at Comic Con, Edie lucidly states that she liked his “careless” treatment of her when Eric hazards another empty apology—and anyway, had Eric ever considered going to an AA meeting to start dealing with his issues (208)? Leilani thus refuses victimhood for Edie in this regard, and claims it for her in others, in a way that never lacks compassion, or at least due nuance, toward the other parties involved: Eric; Edie’s mother and father respectively; and Clay, an older man and one of the only other Black people in Edie’s town growing up, who statutory-rapes and impregnates her, which leads to an abortion and depression that continue to haunt her.
When Eric asks why Edie liked being hit and choked, she hypothesizes that it maybe had “something to do with my dad,” who we know serially cheated on Edie’s mom and abandoned the grieving, teenaged Edie after her abortion (208). The linkage is given no specific credence—it comes across almost like a joke, in fact. What’s happening there is that Edie’s sense of self—which ranks her enjoyment of being hurt in a sexual context low on the list of worries, if it appears at all—eclipses the pathetic Eric’s self-exoticizing self-flagellation.
Still, a sex-positivity scan censures the lack of consent and conversation between Edie and Eric on this front, the way the cycle of Eric’s violence and apologies seems a lot like, well, abuse. No instruction manual is this novel; maybe Edie will feel differently about these encounters with Eric later in life, and maybe she won’t. What Leilani seems to stand firm on, however, is the idea that some women—including some Black women!—are kinky, kinky in ways that could eroticize or at least evoke racialized dynamics that may feel less than proper or comfortable. By the same token, it could be the onlooker supplying the racial subtext simply by virtue of the collision of certain dermises, nothing to do with the content of the sex itself. (A professor named Jennifer C. Nash wrote a very interesting book about this.)
Kinky or not, for decades Black women have participated in, commented upon, and rebelled against a certain “culture of dissemblance” when it comes to our sexualities—whether out of self-protectiveness, or out of a felt imperative to simplify or sanitize the image of our desires in others’ eyes (i.e. Black men, Black children, white women and men…and for trans and queer Black women and femmes, all the more so!). As Evelynn Hammonds writes, “Black feminist theorists have almost universally described black women's sexuality, when viewed from the vantage of the dominant discourses, as an absence.” This idea is summed up quite neatly in Hortense Spiller’s reading of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. While most of the “party’s” plates feature the vaginas of notable white women, Sojourner Truth’s plate features her face instead: ”By effacing [Truth’s] genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but might well suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place.” This is precisely why the many desires articulated by Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers; the songs of blues women like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; the audacious sexiness of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “W.A.P.” are all so profound: they stand in disrespectability, disregard of the prevailing ethos of concealment, false deference, and placation.
Likewise, Luster stands on the side of not just the transgressive but of the transgressively vulnerable: it is “radically candid” about the way that Edie’s unresolved traumas intersect with her sexuality, and her creativity as a whole (142). Within her are subsumed absences and indelible memories, and these cut chaotically across her efforts to recreate the world as she sees it in her art and relationships. As she notes when she discovers Rebecca’s douche under the bathroom sink, the other woman’s sexuality (qua her vagina) might be undefined, like “a Rorschach or a xenomorph.” Edie, conversely, has “had little choice” in the matter: “The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt” (123). Rather than a hierarchy necessarily, these namings seem to represent two sides of the same coin of the problem that is sexual wellbeing and agency in a misogynist, misogynoirist, transmisogynistic society.
With that reality in mind, there is something so loving about Leilani granting Edie the right to not have her whole self figured out, to make questionable, even self-injurious choices—not unlike Akila’s accidentally chemical burned scalp. I may have cringed and wanted to shield Edie from Eric’s nasty hands and words—but she has just as much right to falter, to try and figure herself out in sometimes bewildering ways, as any other young 20-something, if not more so. As Edie eventually realizes, just like Eric, who she’d idealized by virtue of his greater number of years on the planet, “I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat” (208).
To me, one of the wonders of Luster is the way in which Eric’s despicability stands for itself, regardless of how Edie feels about it, how it fits into her process of psychic rebirth: Leilani seems not to expect her reader to expect anything of substance or surprise about Eric; without turning him into a flattened caricature, the text denies him any benefit of the imagination or doubt. (I can just imagine defending his characterization in a fiction workshop: “He’s not a sketch! He’s just not interesting. That is his character.”) In the beginning, though, Eric seems like a ticket out of the mundane, lonely, and frustrated all rolled into one as far as Edie’s concerned. Not without pathetic glimmers (mostly around Akila, and even these are sus, such as Eric’s felt obligation to hold things together since Rebecca didn’t want to adopt in the first place [which he then deals with by having ill-advised relationships with younger women, drinking, and doing shrooms at his daughter’s special event]), overall he is mediocre, selfish, of weak character, unable to be a full agent in life despite having every advantage ferried to him.
That’s not the story, though; Edie’s regard of him, and shifting reasons for and degrees of investing in him, is. Likewise, Leilani crafts racism in a way that feels forgone and ambient without becoming sublimated, or fetishized in some way. Some distinct episodes occur, as when Edie critiques Pradeep, and of course the climax, in which the police assault Edie and Akila on Eric and Rebecca’s lawn.
With this scene I think, as does Edie, as does really anyone reading this book in the year 2020, of the legions of Black people harmed or murdered by the police as a matter of course. I think of these recurrent, devastating seizures in the fabrics of typical days full of and structured by mundane and structural racism—and now, this: conclusive racism. The summoning of that part of Edie that is always ready to die, the part that maybe Akila has too, or will going forward from this moment on her (?) lawn, and maybe me too. I think of all this, and I think of a dream I once had growing up in the white suburbs, the Ku Klux Klan setting up shop in the expanse of land between my house and my neighbor’s house, beyond the bend of the cul-de-sac, and I was terrified to have to walk in their sight in order to get into my home (no Bessie Smith was I). That to say, from my experience, Leilani captures the particular paranoia, whether tranquilized or fever-dreamlike, of existing as a Black person in a white suburb.
Which is exactly the situation Akila finds herself in, and the situation in which Edie leaves her. Despite Edie’s healthy skepticism, she and Akila are natural companions, their alliance further blurring and complicating Edie’s self-identification: in Akila, Rebecca, and Eric’s house, Edie is by turns a ghost, a maid, a little cunt in spring, a nanny, a playmate, an avaricious orphan, a provocateur, thief, refugee—in so many iterations, somebody’s lost daughter. In so many iterations, an artist. With Akila, she is less lost, and vice versa.
As with Edie, Leilani is careful and clear about claiming and not claiming victimhood for Akila: When Edie says she’s sorry that Akila has been through so much turbulence and loss in her young life, including losing her home and parents to Hurricane Katrina and bouncing between foster families, Akila pauses the video game they’re planning to counter, “‘That’s such a weird thing to say. That you’re sorry…I just don’t want to have to do that again, okay?’” “‘Okay,’” Edie agrees, and they don’t discuss it further (143). What gets Akila’s misplacement across more poignantly and particularly than her initial rainbow of cheap, scratchy wigs from Party City? The FEMA jacket she’s only recently started to let go of? Yet her toughness doesn’t prevent her from turning to Edie once she trusts her: showing her her burned scalp, letting Edie take her to get her first protective style in the city, letting Edie know that she sometimes shoplifts and inviting her to do so with her.
Like Edie, Akila is making her way and reaping what she can from her chance installation in whiteness. When Edie’s stay comes to an end, there is tenderness but no hard feelings, their bond echoed in a playfully sublime moment during the motley crew’s drive to Comic Con: “[T]here is a black girl in the car next to us cosplaying as Geordi La Forge. When she sees us, she lowers her visor, leans out of the window, and reaches for Akila’s hand. But the light turns green and the car turns onto a side street, her frantic scream of Live long and prosper! blunted by city noise” (201). The propulsion of life may be unrelenting, and not every bond is (forever), but one Black girl’s recognition of and goodwill toward another could transcend it all.
