Book Report: Luster

24. Raven Leilani, Luster (2020) (10/25/2022)

Two years ago I participated in a reading series with University of Houston professor Pete Turchi. I reported on most of those books, all of which centered on the theme of "Border Crossings." (The first report is here.) One of the books we read, A Cowrie of Hope, kept jumping into my head as I traveled recently through Madagascar, where I witnessed so much of what it described (though there in the context of Zambia), such as extreme poverty and scraping an existence from the land, a desire for a brighter future for a beloved child, the narrow dirt paths heading off into a seemingly empty landscape. It was a book I would never have happened upon on my own. So when I got home I wrote Pete and asked if he'd done another such series, and whether he'd share the reading list. He responded quickly and generously. He said the most recent theme had been "Passion," and he listed these books:

Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Raven Leilani, Luster
Javier Marias, A Heart So White
Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter
Charles Portis, True Grit

He also mentioned that "there was a lot of excitement around Hurricane Season and A Heart So White, as well as Luster and Paul... With Lolita we read a recent collection of essays called Lolita in the Afterlife."

Well! I had my work cut out for me, didn't I? I had heard of only a few of these books. So off to the virtual bookstore I went.

Leilani's Luster is narrated by 23-year-old Edie, a Black editorial coordinator of children's books. It starts with her talking about sex, with a man twenty years older than her, Eric, married, white, whom she met (of course) online. The story line might not be especially relevant to 67-year-old me, but the writing sparkled. I kept going. Soon we meet Eric's wife, Rebecca. He's an archivist, she performs autopsies at the VA hospital. It turns out they have an adopted daughter, also Black, Akila. The marriage is an "open" one. Edie loses her apartment and is invited to move in and serve as a sort of mentor to Akila. She also loses her job, and returns (insecurely, self-consciously) to her real love, painting.

Those are the bare bones, but the book is about much more than plot. It is replete with incisive social detail and compelling introspection. Though I must say, by about page 150—75 pages from the end—I was growing a bit weary of the barrage. To be in the head of this woman and never able to just relax, it was a lot. 

But I'm glad I read Luster. Edie is a force. Engaged, aware, accepting no nonsense. People like her—and I know they are actually out there, not just in fiction—will make this world a better, fiercer place. 

For my quote, I'll give you the last paragraph of the book—which doesn't really give away anything. Edie has just painted a last portrait of Rebecca, naked and potent.

When she is gone, I stow the painting in a place I am unlikely to notice it regularly, and for a moment, I feel like I've forgotten how to be alone. It is not that I want company, but that I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes. The acceptable interval for which I can be embarrassed for what I said to the [abortion] doctor has passed, but I still think about it for weeks, what I meant when I said I was an artist. I think about the painting in the clinic [Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth] and the canvas fibers curled beneath the oil. All the raw materials that are gathered and processed into shadow and light. The pigments drawn from sand and Canterbury bells, the carbon black drawn from fire and spread onto slick cave walls. A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don't. So I've tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. 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 gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.

Pete says his next reading series will be about place, and will be called "Road Trips." I'm already excited. But in the meantime, I've got a few others about passion waiting for me.