I was never really here
I am habitually late to parties. I tease the line that divides chic and forgivably unpunctual with poor taste, leaving the murky business of establishing an evening’s tone to early goers when possible, preferring instead, a lively entrance or to slip on as an addendum to half-formed clusters of conversations. Such social tendencies are mirrored in my media engagement. Continuously, I find myself behind the moment, reading a book or watching a movie after the takes have passed and something new is in the spotlight. I would love to claim my cultural tardiness is always intentional, that I avoid having my perception of a text clouded by popular discourse, or that I am above chasing the elation of Best Immediate Response. Mostly, I am forgetful and have clung to my midwestern sensibility of often being a little out of step.
This is all to say I am expectedly late to Raven Leilani’s Luster which debuted in the summer of 2020 to rave reviews. I was fortunately reminded of the book by Heven Haile’s article, “The unbearable whiteness of the 'disaffected young woman' genre” for i-d. Luster, Haile writes, “follows a Black woman as she navigates early twenties malaise and a novel relationship with a forty something year old white man in an open marriage.” The young narrator, Edie, is reckless and underachieving. She lives in a mouse infested apartment in Bushwick and works in publishing and though decent at her job, she is also awkward, friendless, and has been on probation twice for sexual inappropriateness. When she sexts Eric—the forty-six-year-old white man in a restrictively open marriage—on her work computer, she is both worried and thrilled by the possibility of being discovered by HR.
Edie is also sensitive, observant, and desperate for companionship which is why her being unfavorably contrasted against Aria, the only other black woman in the office, who has perfected the art of being “black and dogged and inoffensive,” is particularly painful. The two women are realistic about their predicament. When Edie commits one offense too many and is fired, the inevitable occurs as Aria is her replacement, “a prettier, more docile model.”
Leilani’s contribution to the canon of characters commonly associated with a certain millennial/Gen Z woman archetype (she is frequently compared to Sally Rooney) lives up to its bestselling hype. Messy, indulgent, sexually, and emotionally promiscuous though generally unhappy are some of the descriptors used to explain these sorts of women. It is seductive to reduce such a character to her inclination for problem-making or to see her lack of virtue as unorthodox, rather than obvious since moral ambiguity is a crux of being a person and a longstanding fixture of literary traditions. The enthusiasm surrounding the discontent young woman may be in part, 6reaction to persistent narratives that present women as mostly likable, minimally flawed and black people as righteous and striving. But Luster isn’t an answer to the masculine, white anti-hero we’ve come accustomed to. It sits among these stories, mirroring a different angle of the same, known world.
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Edie’s dismissal coincides with her apartment’s sudden rent increase. Though a stint doing postmates isn’t feasible enough to stave off eviction, it brings her into fated contact with Rebecca, Eric’s wife. Learning she’s unhoused Rebecca offers Edie the guest room at their suburban New Jersey home, unbeknownst to her husband. What appears to be startling generosity is eclipsed by the presupposition that Edie can assist with the couple’s recently adopted black teenage and friendless daughter, Akila.
The novel unfurls into an unexpected family drama, anchored by Leilani’s stark sentences. She deftly builds clauses to a punchy encapsulation, like this one revealing Edie’s worsening state:
“I check my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days.”
Poverty, Luster reminds, doesn’t merely heighten one’s vulnerability to mounting bills or health crises, it also makes one more prone to absurdity. The story can be read as a witty subversion or deconstruction of classic tales of infidelity and domesticity as Alexandra Schwartz aptly asserts. But it’s an underlying theme of displacement that makes for the tension of the narrative. There’s a tacit understanding that Edie’s housing is dependent on her ability to edify her adolescent roommate on blackness. Akila is already acquainted with the frailty of domestic life, how easily a marital fracture can result in her uprooting as was the case in previous foster homes. The presence of her new father’s new mistress unsettles any semblance of comfort she has achieved. Expulsion—Edie’s eviction and Akila’s surviving Hurricane Katrina—thrusts all of the characters together under the Walker’s roof and compels an (initially, somewhat reluctant) alliance for the pair.
It’s not only the threat of further destabilization that conjoins them but recognition as well, “that thing which is both hypervisible and invisible: black and alone.” When they first notice each other from across a room full of white people, the moment mirrors Edie’s first encounter with Aria at the office. In both instances, Edie yearns for connection—the sudden identification with another when previously the only, highlights the isolation often relegated to background noise like a low humming fan, a twist on Zora Neal Hurston’s articulation, I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. Displacement then is not just external circumstance, but akin to internal incongruity, an awareness of being out of place.
This is further shown by the loss of biological mothers for both Akila and Edie, one by Hurricane Katrina the other sucide. A disconnection and removal from one’s own lineage.
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I’ve often bemoaned relatability as a marker of distinction not because I think it inconsequential, but when resonance is elevated to the most important feature, it follows that makers of media deemed unrelatable may have a more difficult time getting their work seen. I’m also troubled by the notion that any critique or disinterest in a work stems from one’s lack of personal connection and experience. An example: I wasn’t unmoved by Rooney’s Normal People because the characters are wealthy and white, though it’s probable that didn't help, but because no sentences clung to me after the novel ended and I found few insights to reexamine.
Yet it’d be dishonest to claim that my interest in Luster is divorced from personal associations or that pester of a phase that is more likely to t/haunt people whose identities belong to any historical subcategory of persons: lived experience. At 17, I moved in with my high school white best friend after my mother and I were evicted from our home of nearly a decade. My friend was a child of divorce so though she primarily lived with her mother and step-dad, I went with her on weekends to visit her father and step-mother. That these homes were short drives from my old apartment, or places I had spent a considerable amount of time pre-eviction did not make the living transition less jarring. Initially I’d believed and anticipated, as did Edie, the brevity of my stay.
I knew then, as I do now, the fortunate nature of my circumstance. I was lucky to have a friend with a guest room and to be among people who did love me, as strained as the affection was at times. Looking back, I’m ashamed to note what a bad house guest I was at my friend’s, and later when living with my cousin and perhaps still at the women’s boarding house. Make yourself at home adults encouraged with a smile and I didn’t quite comprehend the accompanying “asterisk” like Edie did, which prompted her to clean the Walker’s house however reluctantly. When no one else was around I ransacked pantries because I had never seen so many brand name snacks outside the stores where they were shelved. I snuck away from the table after dinner without clearing my own plate because it seemed to be a task administered to wives. I’d only ever known life among single mothers. Who was I to make sense of labor distribution among nuclear families? I aimed to make myself quiet, minimize the physical evidence of my existence except when inconvenient for my wants.
Leilani articulates this impetus to make oneself small and the clash of gratitude with resentment. “Even when I make myself comfortable…I have the sensation of stepping into someone else's shoes.” It is a difficult and sometimes enraging weight to carry, to always feel you are impinging because in a way, you are. Though I might not have lived up to chore expectations, I knew the implicit social bounds. Since I was often viewed as the sensibile, nice kid by parents, I found myself in the crosshairs of my friend's adolescent rebellion. Her parents expected me to watch over, steer her away from drinking and whatever teen girl interests that may have put her in proximity to harm. While my friend wanted me to go along, rehearse the lie so we had the same silly story that was inevitably uncovered in an attempt to attend a club or college party. My housing depended on the precarious straddling of a line—adhering to the rules of afterschool special while engaging in the melodramatics of teen soaps. The now apparent racial complications of the situation were unnoticed or at least unspoken. Talking big and loud about race was what one did under one’s own roof, not as a guest in someone else’s.
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“I wanted to write a story about a Black woman who fails a lot and is sort of grasping for human connection and making mistakes,” Leilani told the New York Times, “I didn’t want her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”
If Luster can be seen as a take on the flaneur, Leilani removes the urban setting associated with the trope placing it in the uniformity of the suburbs. Witnessing the eccentries of upper-middle class suburbia as a visitor is one thing but adjusting to its intimacies in a more permanent stay is another. Edie makes critical assessments of the Walker family and the whiteness of the town while analyzing her own role as well. She is less ambivalent than she is craving, aching to be seen with the same perceptivity that she can see in others.
