Field Notes from a Reader: Luster by Raven Leilani

Luster is a novel narrated by Edie, a young woman struggling as an editorial assistant at a publishing house, who secretly dreams of being an artist and yet struggles with fears of inadequacy. She enters a relationship with a married man in an open marriage, but soon it grows more complicated when she forms bonds not just with him, but his wife and daughter. With Raven Leilani you get everything, delicious language, a commitment to the art of writing, a spell-binding protagonist, and a twisting, intense narrative arc. Sometimes, I find myself reaching for the book and opening it to a random page, just so I can savor a sentence or two of Leilani’s prose.

Luster explores the expectations placed on women in the world, particularly women in relationship to men, and how that relationship will always be unequal, no matter how “good” the man might be: 

"It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial    ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise." (30)

This unease permeates how Edie navigates her relationships with men, and Leilani is relentless is narrating the unspoken calculations Edie must make when weighing whether to trust someone who, by nature of gender, will almost always have the upper hand in the power dynamic.

The narration is tight and controlled, which allows Edie to fully embody her feelings on the page and is both violent and tender as she probes the dichotomy of what is expected of her as a woman, caught between being herself and the performance of a woman as an uncomplicated, servile fantasy: “He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth” (14). In this way the narrator is caught between the oppositional desires of her own needs and the need to be the fantasy: “All I want is for him to have what he wants. I want to be uncomplicated and undemanding. I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am. I want all that and I want none of it” (10).

It is through this deep commitment to both language and intimacy that Leilani is able to excavate the nuances of what it means to be a woman in 21st century America and is unafraid to explore a complicated female protagonist who doesn’t necessarily measure up to the cultural narratives surrounding “good behavior” for women. Edie is the “other woman” and yet Leilani reconfigures her to the actual voice and experience of a real woman, instead of just a stereotype. She is a woman who is messy and complicated and also still subjected to a stricter moral judgment than the man who is engaging equally in the same behavior with her.

Leilani, Raven. Luster. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2020. Print.