Luster by Raven Leilani, thoughts
Leilani’s writing is incisive and intelligent, her writing skill bringing to mind both Edie and Rebecca, the female characters in Luster. Rebecca, a medical examiner who understands things (such as the human body) by taking them apart with sharp instruments, and Edie, a different kind of examiner, an artist who tries to understand things (mostly herself) by reconstituting them with the soft instruments of badger hair and sable. And that is Raven Leilani’s writing, half dagger, half decisive brushstroke that gives a level of precision and exactness that I have never encountered with a remove that feels too familiar.
At a certain point, Rebecca works on bodies while Edie paints them and you can almost see Leilani above them, writing and sketching them out, the story a cadaver to be shaded and carefully painted in shadow and light. And that cadaver, a stand-in for the other things that keep the female characters at a remove from each other. The husband/lover they both reluctantly share. The daughter they both reluctantly share. The facts of being a woman that only they, in their situation, can understand. That watchfulness women only have towards other women, for other women. The capability we share as women, of being betrayed by our bodies and by our desires.
“though on some level we are aware of the drone and how we have begun to mirror its signature as we talk, the content of our words increasingly illegible as we move around each other like two magnets of identical charge”
And this remove is familiar too because it is a common response to trauma, which Edie has certainly experienced. A dead father who was a Vietnam vet, a mother who has taken her own life, an oppressive SDA upbringing. All of these are written about, but somehow don’t feel too much for the reader. Edie has intellectualized them. She has experienced them. They do not make up who she is. There is no catharsis here, no false packaging of the female as her traumatic experiences. Those who inflict trauma do not have the chance in this book to be the central power that the female needs to process, be shaped by, or break free from. Ok, so maybe just a different kind of catharsis then, a release from a form or a narrative that has always positioned women to be powerless.
And the end. The female painted. A painting that, like the female characters, is mutable, shifting in the light. Trying to get at all the angles, not without darkness and shadow and a challenging pose. A woman, like a painting, who will never look or be the same twice. Who refuses to be pinned down as a thing understood or a thing made.
And it took my breath away, this ending where these women really saw each other, “affirmed by another pair of eyes.” This thing I’ve never seen before. A new way for women to look at each other, if we would just try to learn.
