THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 65
“Luster” is an adultery novel with tricks up its sleeve.
BOOKS
ALL THE WRONG PLACES
Restlessness and recklessness in Raven Leilani’s début novel.
BYALEXANDRASCHWARTZ
PHOTOGRAPH BY SOPHIA WILSON
O
ne reason that the novel, despite
so many tedious predictions to
the contrary, stubbornly refuses to die is
that the world that fiction helps us
see keeps shifting shape. Take Raven
Leilani’s first book, “Luster” (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), which tells the story
of Edie, a twenty-three-year-old pub-
lishing peon who begins an affair with
a married man she meets on a dating
site. You could be forgiven for thinking
that adultery, a cornerstone of so many
great nineteenth-century novels, had
been exhausted as a subject. Sexual bar-
riers have long since been torn down, ta-
boos lifted, transgressions neutralized;
from Anna Karenina’s point of view,
things would look positively utopian. Yet
the heart is as muddled by freedom as it
was by constraint, and that is where the
mordant, bruising “Luster” charges in.
Leilani is twenty-nine, a graduate of
New York University’s M.F.A. program
in fiction, and from the opening sen-
tence her novel showcases her style with,
well, a bang: “The first time we have
sex, we are both fully clothed, at our
desks during working hours, bathed
in blue computer light.” That casual
disclosure is typical of Leilani’s know-
ing, understated wit. She is a sharp
phrasemaker—we get “the high-fruc-
tose sun” of an amusement park, and an
older co-worker’s “bleached, Warholian
cool”—and she loves catching her reader
off guard by tweaking a sentence mid-
way through, switching up speeds, like
a pitcher, so that a passage that begins
modestly suddenly gathers momentum,
shooting forward in long, arcing phrases
that stay improbably in flight. Here is
Edie with Eric, the guy she’s having
cybersex with at the start, together at a
club’s throwback disco night:
But the beauty of disco is the too much, is
the horn section and the cheese, and so Eric
and I convene in the bathroom over a spoon
and someone is in the stall next to us with bare
feet weeping and we go out into the middle
and Eric is a very coordinated white man but
given to fall back on the cabbage patch and the
diddy bop, which is fine, and then we’re in his
car with the AC all the way up, on a reason-
able clip through the Holland Tunnel, and he’s
handing me his phone and asking me to de-
cline a call from his wife, which makes me feel
terrible, not out of any fealty to Rebecca but
because this night appears to have generated
from some greater marital drama, though of
course I relish denying the call...
This is a hundred and forty-two
words and still Leilani hurtles on, tak-
ing Edie to Eric’s house in suburban
New Jersey and into his bedroom,
“where all the pictures are facedown,
which is a level of premeditation that
gives me pause, but that ultimately eases
me out of my clothes because to do all
this he would have to know I would say
yes, he would have to believe himself
capable of finessing the initial yes into
the terminal yes in such perfect order
that I would even go to Jersey and the
idea that he understands this, his total
control of the situation, is what does
me in.” There’s a “look what I can do”
joy in Leilani’s prose that delights in
the rapture it describes, capped, in that
surrender to “yes,” by a nod to Molly
Bloom, who knows a thing or two herself
about the erotics of a breathless run-on.
The novel is narrated in the present
tense, for a reason. Edie can’t get much
purchase on her past. If she could, she
might avoid making the same mistakes
that sink her over and over. Sex is the
big one. She is, by her own description,
the “office slut” at the publishing house
where she works as something called
the “managing editorial coordinator” of
the children’s imprint, and has slept with
everyone from the I.T. guy to the head
of the art department. This has done
nothing to advance her career—quite
