But why? Do they want her to somehow help with their daughter? Soon, Edie, who's lost her job, is staying at their house, too.
She discovers they have a Black foster daughter Akila, a comics-loving tween who's not wholly at ease living with white foster parents in a white suburb. Edie goes to Eric's home, where she encounters his wife Rebecca, a tightly-wound medical examiner with, quote, "chunky, tragic sneakers and freaky competence," unquote. When he asks if he can hit her, she answers yes.īut just when one fears that "Luster" might sink into endless woeful lusting, the book slyly pivots. He capitalizes on Edie's often masochistic need to experience life through her senses. When they finally meet, Eric toys with her, calling her names, withholding sex and talking about his wife back in New Jersey with whom he claims to have an open marriage. One of them is Eric, a digital archivist in his 40s with whom she has an online flirtation. And there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve. There are men, she tells us, who are an answer to a biological imperative, who might chew and swallow. Instead, she shares a crummy apartment in - where else? - Brooklyn and works as a low-paid drone at a publishing house, where her free-range libido leads her to have sex with seemingly everyone.įor her, men are functional. Her heroine Edie is an eagle-eyed African American woman in her 20s who can't get it together to pursue her dream of being a painter. I felt that way at the beginning of "Luster," the crackling debut novel by Raven Leilani, a 29-year-old writer who sports a nicely tailored prose style and a stinging sense of humor.
I want to grab them and say, don't let him do that to you. And they do it so casually that it unleashes my inner grandpa. And so they have sex, often really lousy sex. JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: I can't say for sure when it began - probably with the brouhaha surrounding Lena Dunham's "Girls." But we're riding a crest of books, movies and TV series about bright young women who can't figure out what to do with their brightness. Our critic-at-large John Powers says the novel establishes Leilani as a writer with talent to burn. The book "Luster" by Raven Leilani, a young Black writer, tells the story of a 20-something woman caught between high artistic dreams and a messy personal life. Our critic-at-large John Powers has a review of a debut novel that's causing a stir in literary circles.
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