THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 67
And there is Rebecca. At first glance,
she seems a stereotypical, high-strung
suburban white woman, preoccupied
with living-room yoga sessions, forever
tugging at something in the garden. Yet
she has an inner ferocity and bewilder-
ing composure in the face of her im-
probable circumstances. She can be a
maddening adversary. After Rebecca
icily dismisses Edie’s report of a racist
aggression directed at Akila, Edie plans
her response: “By midnight, I have a
carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an
entire treatise on the conspiracy of op-
pression, though at one o’clock when I
have rehearsed my supporting data and
reimagined our conversation as one in
which I don’t let Dr. King down, I sud-
denly feel that she can go fuck herself.”
Leilani thrives in this hyperconscious
register; this is the sincere comedy of a
powerfully observant mind spinning its
gears as thought rushes far ahead of ac-
tion. Edie rattles on righteously to her-
self about “intellectual labor” and how
“the onus is not on the oppressed to
consider the oppressor,” before arriving
at a simpler realization: “It becomes
clear to me, how keenly she is alone.”
Edie is learning a kind of novelistic way
of seeing, one that requires looking into,
rather than through, another person.
The novel echoes this looking, trans-
ferring its erotic attention to Rebecca.
Edie, dwelling on Rebecca’s body, “as
smooth and as featureless as silt” (there
is some snooping after Eric returns
home and to his wife’s bed), is both
jealous and admiring of Rebecca’s abil-
ity to seize control of a situation that
was meant to exclude her: “It bothers
me that she doesn’t wear prettier un-
derwear, that her marriage is inscruta-
ble and involved, and that I am some-
where inside it.”
Leilani, a commendably patient nov-
elist, comfortably dwells in such inscru-
tability. She sometimes falters when she
tries to be overly legible, or pushes her
vivid sensibility a measure too far. Re-
becca works as a medical examiner at
a morgue, sawing through skulls as she
listens to the Hall & Oates station. At
one point, Edie, on a fruitless job hunt,
interviews to be the receptionist at a
clown school. Although people do work
at morgues, and clowns must come from
somewhere, these garish touches, in a
novel already highly attuned to the ev-
eryday surreal, lack the subtle weight
that makes invented things seem true.
Rebecca’s job, in particular, functions as
unneeded shorthand for parsing her
character, and Leilani does something
similar with Edie’s penchant for pain.
Throughout the novel, we get glimpses
of her past in brief, vivid scenes woven
into the broader narrative. We learn
that she was brought up in upstate New
York as a Seventh-Day Adventist. Her
mother was a mentally unstable addict
who committed suicide, her father a re-
mote veteran given to domestic vio-
lence and womanizing. “I think of my
parents, not because I miss them, but
because sometimes you see a black per-
son above the age of fifty walking down
the street, and you just know that they
have seen some shit,” she tells us, with
definitive, moving simplicity. But too
clear a tethering line is drawn from
Edie’s sorrowful childhood to the mas-
ochistic streak that emerges in her re-
lationship with Eric. (She likes to be
punched and choked beyond the bounds
of mere role play; more troubling, he
obliges with glee.) The violence, figured
as a distress signal glossed as kink, feelsfamiliarly coded—action that clarifies,
rather than complicates, character.
In a sense, such stumbles are the flip
side of the novel’s successes; both stem
from Leilani’s hunger to pack so much
of what she knows about the world into
one deceptively narrow drama. Artistic
trial and error is a precious prerogative,
and one that the novel explicitly enacts
through the motif of Edie’s painting.
“A way is always made to document
how we manage to survive, or in some
cases, how we don’t,” Edie thinks. “So
I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable
thing.” There’s that word again, “inscru-
table,” applied to herself. There is more
than a touch of Ralph Ellison here, the
hypervisible invisible woman who is
cast by the world in categorical terms
while trying to be seen for herself—or,
as Edie puts it, “I want to be affirmed
by another pair of eyes.” When she wants
to understand something, to really see
it, Edie makes a painting. She has been
trying and failing to do a self-portrait;
the colors are off, the likeness doesn’t
work. Still, she sticks with it, driven by
the truest of all desires: to make her
own image appear.“We decided to restore our home to its original state.”