Luster by Raven Leilani

Luster
By Raven Leilani
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

There’s something telling about the fact that Raven Leilani’s much-hyped debut novel Luster opens with a transparent misstatement of fact - a lie, in other words - about sex. The novel’s first line is: “The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light.” The ‘we’ here are our two main characters, Edie, a poor twenty-something working stiff at a New York publishing house and Eric, a forty-something married man, and in this opening scene, they’re not even in the same part of town, much less in the same room - so they aren’t having sex. 

The point isn’t that Leilani is trafficking in some kind of hep new-speak involving phone sex; you can new-speak until the cows come home, but you can’t have sex with somebody who’s not there with you. No, the point is subtler and maybe more novelistic: readers of Luster are signalled right from the first line that Leilani will not only describe the reality of her novel but also define it. And the extent to which you like this novel, maybe the extent to which you fall for the hype, will largely depend on your willingness to agree when the author tells you that two plus two is five.

As that opening sentence indicates, Edie falls into a sexual affair with Eric, who tells her he’s in an ‘open marriage’ with his wife, who has nevertheless written down some rules for their mutual infidelities. At least I assume that’s what the list includes - Leilani tells us about it but doesn’t tell us what it actually contains, nor does Eric volunteer its contents, nor does Edie ask about its contents in the moment. In other words, any semblance of realism in the scene is sacrificed out of hand for … for what, exactly? 

It’s one of many such decidedly odd narrative decisions Leilani makes in the course of the book. She tells us that her characters are having sex when they’re in fact chatting online. She tells us Eric’s wife Rebecca has written a list of their ‘open marriage’ rules, but she doesn’t tell us what the list says, even though every single party involved - Eric, Edie, and the reader - would realistically want to know. In a later scene, when Edie is fired from the job she hates, she confronts Eric in his office, takes a ceremonial katana off its wall display, and cuts her hand open with it, spilling blood on his carpet and continuing to bleed as she takes the subway back home. But Eric doesn’t rush her to the hospital; nobody on the subway seems to care or even notice that this young woman is gushing blood from her hand, and the whole way home, Eric is sending her cute photos on her phone, rather than asking her about her bleeding hand. None of these things would happen in the normal world, but Luster isn’t billed as The Twilight Zone.

It’s all of a piece with the weird alternate-reality Leilani is conveying in a novel that’s nevertheless very obviously pitched as a ‘way-things-really-are’ reading experience. And far more jarring incidents are yet to come, the most unbelievable of which feature Rebecca, who may have composed a list of ‘open marriage’ rules but who’s portrayed throughout the novel as a simple stock-variety Scorned Wife. At one point after Edie’s affair with Eric has been going on for some time, we get a howler of a scene right out of some surreal fantasy novel:

And now I know where he lives so ten days after having fucked him in the bed he shares with his wife I go right up to the door and find it unlocked, and no one is home, so I walk around the house and pick up these cold lemons on the counter and roll them around in my hands, and I open the fridge and take a drink of milk and carry the carton up to the bedroom where a door opens to a closet with a collection of women’s clothes and I gather the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands and then there is a voice, and I turn and standing in the doorway of the attached bathroom in yellow rubber gloves and a T-shirt that says Yale is his wife.

The house is unlocked, which is bad enough, and then what does Edie do? Well, as pretty much anybody would do in such a situation, she goes inside, walks around, handles the food, slurps milk from the refrigerator and brings the carton up to the bedroom, and rummages in the clothes closet, of course. Same thing happened to me twice last week. It's one of many points in the novel where any reader could be forgiven for laughing out loud. This is not slice-of-life; this is Slutty Mistress of Narnia.

The novel flows on from there, Rebecca agreeing to have Edie live in the house and chum around with the couple’s adopted black daughter Akila, and through it all Leilani is an eloquent and sometimes genuinely funny presence (“Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well,” Edie reflects at one point, for instance, and at another: “I am enjoying myself, and not just because dying means I won’t have to pay my student loans”), despite the occasional very serious theme that surfaces from time to time in the adventures of our main character. Edie is almost entirely obsessed with sex, but sometimes she reflects on other things:

Aria is the most senior editorial assistant. She is also the only other black person in our department, which forces a comparison between us that never favors me. Not only is she always there to supply a factoid that no one knows about Dr. Seuss, she is also lovely. Lovely like only island women are; her skin like some warm, synthetic alloy. So she’s very popular around the office with her reflective Tobagonian eyes and apple cheeks, doing that unthreatening aw-shucks shtick for all the professional whites. She plays the game well, I mean. 

Is this kind of stuff slyly profound? Or is it just another example of the chic-progressive racism that’s become blandly accepted among the literati in the 21st century? Certainly a white-skinned author who wrote a paragraph like that about black characters would be social-media exiled to Ultima Thule for the rest of time, but Leilani is far more likely to be cheered for real-world tell-it-like-it-is verisimilitude by the same hipsters out in Willamsburg who've uncomplainingly swallowed all the science fiction that crops up elsewhere in the book.

There is ample intelligence in Luster, but it's unfocused. There's plenty of biting social commentary, but it's scatterbrained and almost wincingly hypocritical. There's some very sharp writing, but it's buried in Twitter posturing and self-pitying ennui. In other words, it's Sally Rooney 2.0. So maybe Leilani's characters aren't the only ones who know how to play the game.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.