Near the end of Luster the narrator, Edie, is thinking about art and what it does, what it’s for: “A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.” She’s a painter, and how she finds her way back to painting is maybe the most satisfying arc of this story—which isn’t to say the rest of it, in which Edie finds herself unexpectedly living in a guest room in New Jersey for a time, isn’t satisfying too. At the start of the book, we learn about the start of Edie’s relationship with Eric: she’s 23 and Black; he’s twice her age and white and in an open marriage with his wife of 13 years, though the open marriage part seems to be new. He and his wife, Rebecca, have an adopted Black daughter named Akila, though Eric doesn’t mention her/we don’t learn about her for a while. We get date scenes with Edie and Eric, and scenes of Edie’s meh office job in publishing, and then, after Eric brings Edie home one night (though this is not allowed, per the list of rules Rebecca wrote up) and proceeds to ghost her, we get Edie, accidentally crashing Eric and Rebecca’s 14th anniversary party. Further events ensue, and when Eric gets home from a work trip he’s surprised to see Edie, who by now is living in that aforementioned guest room.
I was expecting this book to be more about Eric and Edie’s relationship than it actually is, which isn’t a criticism: the dynamics between Edie and Rebecca and Edie and Akila are really interesting, and each relationship lets Leilani explore issues of race and class and power. And Leilani’s writing is really really good—there are funny moments and dark moments and occasional paragraph-long sentences that are perfect, with phrases like this: “the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.” Or sentences like this: “When Eric was away, the house was filled with sound, Akila’s and Rebecca’s routines textured and discordant, water and glass, sticky sounds of trash and sparring gear and doorjambs swollen with heat, the mailman and the democratic socialist at the door, all the toilets at the mercy of a houseful of women, the sensory meridian of tangled jewelry, of bobby pins and linoleum, of dubbed anime and the neighbor’s dog. Otherwise a soft cosine of electricity and digital noise.” And I like the way we get pieces of Edie’s past and family history amidst the present-tense action: stories about her parents, and about her Seventh-day Adventist upbringing.
Leave a Reply