Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family
I don’t know if I’m depressed or if this book is just the antithesis of its title – but my inability to care about anything that was happening, despite all the chaos, was unmatched. Can’t explain it but this book is both explicit and clinical – and also written is such an interesting way. And I’m not sure it’s a way I like because I struggled with it. I kept wondering, if it’s brilliant and I just don’t get it, or is it trying really hard to be brilliant and missing the mark?
I’ve seen people call it funny, brutal, and tender. I didn’t experience it that way at all. To me, the whole thing felt emotionally detached – so detached that I kept waiting to feel or think something of it, anything, but nothing ever came. There’s a strange vacancy in the writing. A deficit of feeling. And instead of being pulled in, I kept drifting further out.
I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am.
― Raven Leilani, Luster
And then there’s the synopsis (the one on the back cover of my copy). At best, it’s a half-truth. At worst, it’s misleading. This book isn’t really about what it claims to be. But I get it – it’s hard to condense something that’s really about nothing. There’s no real plot ( which isn’t a crime but still). I’m not even sure there’s a story. It’s just characters orbiting one another while the narrator reflects on her bleak, joyless life.
Maybe my disdain for it is because I just can’t imagine being 23 and starting a bizarre relationship with an older white man who has a white wife and an adopted Black daughter.
Listen, perhaps it’s cause I have always had a decent support system, never known this extent of desperation and have friends who would smack me across the face if I made the series of reckless decisions this woman is making. But wow. I couldn’t relate. At all.
I understood I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.
― Raven Leilani, Luster
Like I can almost forgive her for getting involved with a married man and showing up at his house because he ghosted her right after they hooked up. But why in God’s name is she telling his wife later on, that she has nowhere to go and receiving the invitation to stay in their house when he’s away on business. (Why is the wife even offering – open relationship be damned because I know the wife isn’t with it.) Why is the main character still there when he’s back. Why does she continue to stay and make herself an awkward limb of the family. Why does she even consider to keep the baby. Is she not afraid of being murdered ??? What is even going on.
But not only was the story ???? but the writing was also kind of verbose – which again, maybe was just too smart for me. The characters and their decisions didn’t feel real. They didn’t even feel interesting in their unreality. They just were. Hovering in this strange, hollow space that never quite became anything more. 2.5/5 stars. Glad this hot mess is over.
I believe like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in it’s pursuit.
― Raven Leilani, Luster
