66 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
the contrary—though there is a recalled
episode of humiliation in which Edie
begs the art-department head to take a
look at her sketchbook. (Even the past
is rendered in the blunt present tense.)
She wants to be an artist, but doubts
her chances: “I am good, but not good
enough, which is worse than simply
being bad.” Sometimes Edie allows her-
self to dream of a parallel life in which,
“fatter and happier,” she paints in her
own studio. It’s telling that this fantasy
is seen from the outside, like a maga-
zine clipping taped to a vision board.
In reality, she barely eats, lives in a
mouse-infested apartment in Bushwick,
and has been in a state of creative pa-
ralysis for two years.
Edie is drawn to Eric by “the potent
drug of a keen power imbalance,” a fa-
miliar aphrodisiac, and here a lightly
comedic one; Eric is a depressive library
archivist, not some mogul, and it’s de-
batable who holds the advantage. During
the heat of the MeToo movement, it
was often said, by people who were dis-
mayed by the explosion of so much fury
and retribution, that young women wield
their own power over older men. This
is undoubtedly true, as Edie knows; the
trouble is that such power quickly ex-
pires, and tends to leave the woman the
poorer for having spent it. But it is ex-
actly this threat of being used, and used
up, that appeals to Edie. Disappoint-
ment is assumed; so is the expectation
of pain, queasily reframed as desire.
To the loaded differences of age, gen-
der, and income, Leilani adds another:
race. Seen through Eric’s eyes, Edie, in
the American formulation that expresses
racial embarrassment by attempting to
hide it, “happens to be black,” while Eric
is white, and awkwardly sidesteps the
subject: “I can feel it in how cautiously
he says African American. How he ab-
solutely refuses to say the word black. ”
Edie is used to navigating white self-con-
sciousness. It’s an unspoken require-
ment at the office, where she is one of
only two Black women. The other, Aria,
is a sparkling overachiever who does
“that unthreatening aw-shucks shtick
for all the professional whites.” Edie
wishes that they could be in cahoots.
Instead, they are nemeses, Aria repelled
by Edie’s alienation and slacker’s petu-
lance, Edie envious of Aria’s cold-eyed,
obsequious compliance, her willingness
to play the corporate game. Leilani takes
advantage of this setting to lampoon
the grist that passes through the cor-
porate publishing mill for the “general”
reader—the lurid fetish for historical
trauma redeemed by white heroics, the
ill-informed cultural voyeurism:
I go up to the table and scan the books, and
there are a few new ones: a slave narrative
about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a
piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative
about a runaway’s friendship with the white
schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how
to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mu-
latto who raises the dead with her magic chit-
lin pies; a domestic drama about a black maid
who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and
dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who ex-
ists only within the bounds of her employer’s
four walls; an “urban” romance where every-
body dies by gang violence; and a book about
a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not
have been written by a white woman from
Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely
primarily on rice-based foods.
It’s daring of Leilani to launch such
a hilarious salvo on the publishing
industry from within, and her timing
turns out to be spot on. The resurgence
of the Black Lives Matter movement
has led to public critiques of the per-
sistent whiteness of the publishing
world—and, perhaps less usefully, to the
circulation of a slew of anti-racist read-
ing lists on social media which tend to
posit books by Black authors as the broc-
coli of American literature, to be con-
sumed by white readers for nutrition,
not enjoyment. It seems like a delicioustrick that “Luster,” a highly pleasurable
interrogation of pleasure, should be born
into this context. Imagine looking for
a lesson and finding, instead, lonely,
mixed-up Edie, mercifully unqualified
to teach anyone, least of all herself.A
ctually, you don’t have to imagine.
The novel dramatizes this situa-
tion, not through Edie’s affair with Eric
but, unexpectedly, through her relation-
ship with his wife. Eric’s marriage isopen, an arrangement that resolves eth-
ical tangles by creating new emotional
ones. For the first stretch of the novel,
the wife, Rebecca, is visible only as
a name on a cell-phone screen, or in
the list of rules that she has written to
govern Eric and Edie’s behavior: no un-
protected sex, no ignoring her calls. Edie
sees such boundaries as provocations,
and one afternoon, crazed with longing
and loneliness, she sneaks into Eric’s
house. She is rifling through his wife’s
closet when the woman herself appears,
in a Yale T-shirt and yellow dish-scrub-
bing gloves. Disaster! Except, weirdly,
not: instead of kicking her out of the
house, Rebecca insists that Edie stay for
what turns out to be the couple’s anni-
versary party. She even lends her a dress.
The spy has made it inside the gates
only to be recruited by the enemy for
some obscure, possibly vengeful pur-
pose. In short order, Edie loses her job
and her apartment, and, after a harried
stint as a messenger for a delivery app,
is taken in by Rebecca, while Eric is
away on a business trip. The invitation
to stay, as much an act of brazen ag-
gression as it is one of charity, disguises
a grudging call for help. Eric and Re-
becca had recently adopted a Black pre-
teen girl, Akila. Rebecca’s idea seems
to be that Edie can serve as a figure of
solidarity and support, a “Trusty Black
Spirit Guide” who will help the friend-
less Akila find her way. Akila, sniffing
out Edie’s own isolation, will have none
of it. Armed with brutal adolescent
candor, she would rather sit behind her
closed door, playing video games and
watching anime, than take pity on her
father’s flailing girlfriend.
Still, as it becomes clear that Edie
has installed herself in the house, an
incongruous family unit begins to form,
with Edie in the unstable position of
Rebecca’s partner, ward, and, after Eric’s
return, sexual competitor. This stealthy
domestic reconfiguring of a novel that
began as a challenge to the domestic
is an ingenious move on Leilani’s part;
the putative homewrecker has become
part of the family. Abandoning the
chaos of New York for the carpeted
hush of suburbia seems very “Get Out.”
The twist is that Edie wants to stay in.
There is calm in New Jersey. Insulated
from the world’s pressures, she starts
to paint again.