Rather, Edie delivers the relatable yet unsentimental facts of her suffering with an eye on the outer world, how it looks, how it is sensed and experienced by the black female body, this one in particular. She is, after all, only around 10 years older than his adopted black daughter Akila, the fourth character in this uncomfortable quartet, which comes together under one roof when Edie is evicted from her roach-infested flatshare.Īlthough there is much for Edie to complain about – her mother killed herself one day after painting the kitchen mauve, Eric is violent towards her, she has IBS and trouble making friends – there is precious little self-pity in these pages. Another is their contrasting associations around a 1977 disco tune playing in his car: he knows the original, Edie the sample. Having already engaged in e-sex via their computer screens, he takes Edie to a theme park, part of the funny apparel Leilani uses to send up the age gap between them. This is Edie speaking: a 23-year-old lapsed painter facing imminent unemployment from her depressing publishing job, out on her first date with Eric, a white, fortysomething digital archivist who is in an open marriage with his wife Rebecca in order to explore other vaginas. There is this sentence, for example, from a scene on the New York subway: “I turn away from my reflection and a man is masturbating under a tarp.” Or: “I am not on the L, smelling someone’s lukewarm pickles, wishing I were dead.” Luster is a cold, hard look at life in a dirty 21st-century metropolis for a struggling young woman craving stability and tenderness, caught mercilessly at the intersection of capitalism, racism and sexism. There is no sing-song, no exotic humming to be imagined in the background. Here this word definitely does not apply. Other descriptions often applied to this kind of writing are “ornate”, “decorative” and, too frequently around the work of black women, “lyrical”. And then there are the writers who live in the cathedral, who make sentences as an act of worship to the feats that words are capable of – I’m thinking of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill, who has hailed American newcomer Raven Leilani’s debut novel as “a lustrous piece of art”. Others give it a little more room, so that language and story walk in tandem. Some step over it to serve a plot, the electric possibilities of the words themselves kept in check or indeed unnoticed. W riters treat language in different ways.

Raven leilani books