Edie, who is Black, becomes an avatar of Akila to white Eric. What Eric is getting out of this arrangement becomes slightly clearer when we find out that he has recently adopted a young Black girl named Akila as his daughter, and that he finds her confusing. She calls him daddy in bed (“it’s not my fault,” she tells us), and he responds by telling her he loves her. She likes that he is older than she is and wealthier and more stable she likes that he is, unlike her own father, someone she can more or less rely on. “In person he is a total daddy,” she tells us. Subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter!Įdie is clear fairly early on that she is drawn to her boyfriend, white and married Eric, because she considers him a father substitute. And she wants the Walkers, whose marriage she walks into, to be her parents.
“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice,” Edie tells us in the final pages of the book, “made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading.” Edie’s reading is psychoanalytical: She’s a classic Freudian. It’s about the way we replicate our childhood family structures in our romantic lives, and how that’s maybe the only way we have of exorcising the trauma of being a child. We follow along as she fiddles with portraits that are both representational and figurative, trying to capture the Walkers, their house, her mother, herself.īut most fundamentally, Luster is a family novel.
Over the course of the novel, Edie goes from being a frustrated amateur unable to improve her basic figure drawing skills to someone capable of capturing on canvas something that feels real. It’s a künstlerroman, meaning that it is about the development of an artist. Leilani is ruthless toward the polite liberal racism and misogyny of this world: the diversity book tables full of slave narratives, the complimentary hand lotion put out in the women’s restroom of a company with a massive gender wage gap, the punishingly low salary and mindless drudgery our protagonist Edie puts up with in exchange for proximity to a world where people make art. It’s a social satire, with all its carefully detailed descriptions of what it’s like to be Black and a woman in the midst of New York media. Luster, the debut novel by Raven Leilani that is the Vox Book Club’s February book pick, exists in several genres at once. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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