Luster by Raven Leilani--A Review

Luster

by Raven Leilani

Gray Planet Commentary

• Edie, the first person narrator, is infuriating, angry, hopeless, apathetic and needy.
• Edie, the first person narrator, is honest, resilient, creative and sexual.
• The ending is transformative.

Gray Planet Indices:

• Good Book Index: 82/100
• Literature Index: 88/100
• Magic Factor: 40/100

I hated this book. In our time of coronavirus and hyper-partisan politics it came at me viciously using long sentences steeped in the cultural vernacular of a person fifty years younger than I, filled with references I didn’t understand, and the righteous anger of a young black woman struggling to find her place personally and professionally in a society that judges her based on her blackness and her gender and little else.

I loved this book. The driving force of Edie’s narration, her unique personality, viewpoint and language, slowly won me over, although it took time. By the last quarter of the book I was mesmerized by her inability to overcome her own choices while persevering as if she could. I was overcome with a sense of pre-ordained doom. I hoped for an epiphany. I savored every word, researched every confusing cultural reference. Because of the way Leilani builds this story and Edie’s character, the ending was satisfying for me, although I can’t tell you why.

Edie, the mid-twenties protagonist narrates in the first person, sometimes with a nearly stream-of-consciousness style that is immediate but difficult for me because it is steeped in the culture of her age group–forty-five years distant from mine. The challenges of Edie’s life, the way she lives it, and the cultural milieu she lives it in are not mine–she is an artist, I was an engineer; she is a passionate, young black woman, I am an older white man; I am privileged in many subtle ways, she is not. She is automatically suspect–by the police, by her employers, by the people she meets–I am automatically trusted.

Those differences are the theme, for me. Leilani had to bludgeon me with it and she almost knocked me out, but I withstood her blows and was given a small window into this life I will never know. I felt viscerally what it was like to be Edie, living with and acknowledging her faults and reveling in her fortitude and her insight.

I read a lot science fiction partly to feel the presence of the other and experience worlds I will never know. Raven Leilani, in Luster has given me the best of that in the familiar setting of my own world, but with a perspective alien to me–that of a young, black woman.