Writers treat language in different ways. Some step over it to serve a plot, the electric possibilities of the words themselves kept in check or indeed unnoticed. Others give it a little more room, so that language and story walk in tandem. And then there are the writers who live in the cathedral, who make sentences as an act of worship to the feats that words are capable of – I’m thinking of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill, who has hailed American newcomer Raven Leilani’s debut novel as “a lustrous piece of art”.
Other descriptions often applied to this kind of writing are “ornate”, “decorative” and, too frequently around the work of black women, “lyrical”. Here this word definitely does not apply. There is no sing-song, no exotic humming to be imagined in the background. Luster is a cold, hard look at life in a dirty 21st-century metropolis for a struggling young woman craving stability and tenderness, caught mercilessly at the intersection of capitalism, racism and sexism. There is this sentence, for example, from a scene on the New York subway: “I turn away from my reflection and a man is masturbating under a tarp.” Or: “I am not on the L, smelling someone’s lukewarm pickles, wishing I were dead.”
This is Edie speaking: a 23-year-old lapsed painter facing imminent unemployment from her depressing publishing job, out on her first date with Eric, a white, fortysomething digital archivist who is in an open marriage with his wife Rebecca in order to explore other vaginas. Having already engaged in e-sex via their computer screens, he takes Edie to a theme park, part of the funny apparel Leilani uses to send up the age gap between them. Another is their contrasting associations around a 1977 disco tune playing in his car: he knows the original, Edie the sample. She is, after all, only around 10 years older than his adopted black daughter Akila, the fourth character in this uncomfortable quartet, which comes together under one roof when Edie is evicted from her roach-infested flatshare.
Although there is much for Edie to complain about – her mother killed herself one day after painting the kitchen mauve, Eric is violent towards her, she has IBS and trouble making friends – there is precious little self-pity in these pages. Rather, Edie delivers the relatable yet unsentimental facts of her suffering with an eye on the outer world, how it looks, how it is sensed and experienced by the black female body, this one in particular. The indefatigable specificity of Leilani’s considerable observational power – the August air “dense with Drakkar Noir, old pollen, and reheated Spam”, for instance – seems to act against any inclination to paint or perceive a marginalised identity with a homogenising stroke. She brilliantly presents an absolute and singular subjectivity while highlighting the big space of structural inequality that works to drown it, refusing a generic reading.
Some of the novel’s funniest moments occur in the navigating of this big space, such as the publishing company and its Diversity Giveaway of slave narratives, urban fiction and East Asian cookbooks. When it comes to a choice between Edie and another, neater black female colleague with “carefully empty eyes”, the latter wins, giving Edie a brief, parting lecture on the futility of her realness, her hapless and unaffordable mediocrity. “There is actually a brief window where they don’t know to what extent you’re black,” she tells Edie, “and you have to get in there. You have to get in the room.” It is Edie’s inability, not refusal, but the sheer, messy humanness that makes it impossible for her to enter the room, which constitutes the story’s triumphant streak. It is a huge gesture of empathy to those who cannot and should not match up to the myth of the superwoman.
Overall there’s not much alleviation of Edie’s problems, but in the context of her warped role as live-in mistress in Eric’s suburban home, she does find mutual comfort and some modicum of fleeting sorority in the acerbic Rebecca and lonely Akila, and importantly, she has begun to paint again. Leilani does some wonderful things with colour, evoking the hues and anguished brushstrokes (she is herself a painter as well as a writer). The visual descriptions are a notable feature of the beauty of this particular cathedral, with its sharp, crystallised prose segments. It enfolds you, is even a little claustrophobic in its darkness, but you could stay in there all day, swathed in the magnificence of its language, the surprises of the sentences and their psychedelic, uncharted destinations. Each one travels somewhere worthwhile and earnestly considered, carrying the story on its back, leading the way. This is a book of pure fineness, exceptional.
