) Once Rebecca enters the novel, however, inviting Edie to her and Eric’s anniversary party after catching Edie breaking into their house, there is a constant shift in power dynamics that always puts Edie at the bottom. But with her roommate deciding to live with her boyfriend, Edie has no other choice but to go outside of her apartment with all her belongings in a trash bag and contemplate her next move.Īt first, we see Rebecca as the person who establishes the rules of Edie and Eric’s sexual relationship: “one of the rules is that his wife can change the rules and one of the new rules is that we can only see each other on the weekends.” (Rebecca’s initial distance from the story-and increasing presence on the page toward the unraveling of the story-recalls the character of Hella from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Soon after the termination of her job, her landlord decides to increase the rent, forcing Edie and her roommates to search for another apartment. Edie’s job as an editorial coordinator at a children’s imprint gets taken from her due to her multiple sexual encounters with many of her male coworkers.
Caught in a power imbalance, Edie waits for Eric to initiate sex that always seems to be on his own terms.Įach space Edie occupies comes with the same limitations and restrictions as her relationship with Eric. She “can tell he is revising me in his head.” Later, Eric breaks one of Rebecca’s rules by inviting Edie to their house. Although Edie sparks intense sexual desire in Eric, she finds herself hemmed in by the restrictions imposed by Rebecca, as well as by who Eric wants Edie to be. We are introduced to twenty-three-year-old artist Edie as she remembers her first sexual encounter with Eric, an older businessman working in uptown New York, after he and his wife, Rebecca, had agreed to an open marriage. The book, which has caught the eye of writers like Justin Torres, Brit Bennett, and Zadie Smith, speaks to Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In it, Lorde states, “Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.” In gut-wrenching and masterful prose, Leilani’s novel demonstrates the validity of Lorde’s quotation through the character of Edie. Raven Leilani’s Luster paints a portrait of a Black woman attempting to make space for herself and her art in white America.
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