A couple of months before graduating from New York University’s MFA fiction programme, Raven Leilani was in Zadie Smith’s class when she got a text from her agent saying that an offer had been made on her first novel, Luster. When it was published in the US a year later, last summer, it went straight on to the New York Times bestseller list and was given an admiring debut review in the New Yorker. Its publication in the UK this month has been heralded with interviews in glossy magazines, including Vogue.
The novel has been “received in a way that I honestly couldn’t even hope for”, Leilani says from her Brooklyn apartment. Like Edie, the artist protagonist of Luster, the author, now 30, had spent many years “doggedly practising her craft”, writing in betweenwhatever nine-to-five job she was doing to pay the rent, all the while updating a spreadsheet of rejection letters. But while finally having her book “out in the world” has been “incredible and surreal”, it has also been a very difficult year. In April, she lost her father to coronavirus. Her brother died of a rare neuro-degenerative disease in September. “Am I allowed to curse?” Leilani asks politely. “It’s been a true mindfuck.”
Luster confronts racism, sexism and capitalism in a feverish blast of sex, smart observations and fury that owes as much to TV hits Girls and Fleabag as to acclaimed literary contemporaries Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. Written in a high-voltage register, the novel takes gleeful delight in subverting literary expectations. Edie, a 23-year-old publishing assistant, is having an affair with fortysomething Eric (who sweetly corrects her online typos). So far so 19th-century with broadband. “The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light,” it begins. But Edie has been recruited to sex-up a suburban couple’s open marriage, in which the rules have been laid down by Eric’s wife, Rebecca. In a narrative of shifting power, Edie ends up moving into the family home while Eric is away, borrowing Rebecca’s clothes and befriending their adopted daughter, Akila, the only black kid in the neighbourhood. Rebecca, a medical pathologist who wields garden secateurs like her bone cutter, could have been a stock vengeful scorned wife. Instead Leilani brings the two women together “to create a kind of unstable and combustible union, which was really fun to write”.
The title is a play on “lust” and lustre, a type of glaze. “For me the book is about desire, and what it means to try to seize the right to make art as a young black woman,” she explains. “I had those two main poles of the book – there’s the body and then there’s art.” Leilani is also an artist; art was her “first love” – lockdown has sent her back to her easel. “It was like a switch flipped and I started painting like crazy.” Above all, she wanted “to faithfully depict a black woman’s consciousness”, to write a character “who has opted out of respectability”, who “lives in defiance of the experiment of containment that I think all black women are trying to live against”. In short, a young woman who was “human, by which I mean fallible. Edie’s journey is brutal. Not only does she personally mess up a lot on the page but in pursuit of her art she fails constantly. It takes a lot to retain that lustre, that yearning in the midst of an environment that is invested in quietening you, dampening that spirit.” The novel is driven by “a rage of having this self that is sublimated as you try to project the most curated and palatable form to the world”.
As has been enthusiastically noted, the novel doesn’t shy away from what Leilani calls “the sticky logistics of sex”. She credits an Audre Lorde essay with giving her “permission to splay and to be overt with my feelings”. For her, a “special ingredient in sex that really jumps off the screen or the page is an oscillation of power”. It is here that the imbalances on which the novel rests are most obvious: from the workplace sexism, where Edie is fired for “sexually inappropriate” behaviour, despite the eager participation of everyone from Jake in IT to art director Mark; to her relationship with Eric, as partial to a spot of violence as to the use of semi-colons; and the erotic frisson between Rebecca and Edie. “Sex was really important to me,” she says. “I try to portray it in the way that moves me when I see it, when it is awkward and silly, which it often is. To depict it that way is to make it tender; what it looks like when two bodies, especially two bodies that are very different, get to know each other. So I try to replicate a version of sex on the page where you as a reader feel like a voyeur, because for me that is the most enjoyable kind of sex to watch and to read.”
While the novel is 100% fiction, she did “what all writers do. I used the data that was there.” This data includes everything from a passion for comics and disco, in particular Donna Summer (“I needed that bit of joy”); the grisly technicalities of Rebecca’s job (her mother was a mortuary technician, “she was really invested in how we send off the dead”); to her own experiences working in a library, in a low-paid publishing job and a stint in the gig economy as a Postmates delivery person to fund her MFA. When we meet her, Edie is “the managing editorial coordinator” for a children’s imprint, “meaning I occasionally tell editorial assistants to fact-check how guppies digest food”.
The publishing scenes are among the sharpest in the novel, including a tirade on the “Diversity” offerings – a joyless list of slave narratives, white martyrs and urban gang violence – all the more acute in a year when the industry has been criticised for its lack of inclusivity. Leilani wanted to include “what it was like to be writing and trying to carve out space to do that while I was working my jobs and dealing with the kind of war on all fronts that you deal with as a black woman”. And the novel is at pains to depict the precariousness of being a young person “without a safety net”, one student loan repayment away from destitution, where the excitement of a date is not so much the sex but a decent dinner. “To replicate a story of an American black woman on the page meant talking about those parts that are unsavoury.”
Leilani was born in the Bronx, but the family moved to a small town near Albany in upstate New York when she was seven. Their deeply religious West Indian household comprised just her mother and father, a veteran the same as Edie’s; her two brothers were much older, “they were grown and gone”. The younger of her brothers gave her her first comic book, setting her on the path to fandom: “Like Akila I was a real geek.” And it was from him that she inherited her love of art. An illness, from which he suffered for six years, stopped him being able to paint. “It took his hands first,” she says. “I watched an artist I really loved and admired slowly lose the ability to make art.”
She came to books late; as a child the Bible was her main reading and source of stories. When she was 17, in her first year of college she was sent on a study year to Florence; it was the first time she had been away from home and had to maintain her faith on her own – “It didn’t go well.” Abandoning the church was “a hard and formative moment” in her life. “I really was a person who believed deeply,” she says. “But it felt like the right thing to do. So I left my faith, after much agony.” As a lapsed believer (again like Edie) she is fascinated by the relationship between grief and God: “I’m always really interested in how the godless make sense of human tragedy, how people make sense of the senseless.”
She shows off a tattoo from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle …” on her wrist, “the first piece of real writing that touched me”. She began writing poems, and her prose is charged with an intensity and rigour, aiming for “a voice that is sensitive to language, that is really particular at the sentence level”. These long, looping sentences begin in one place and often lead somewhere unexpected. “I think that surprise is central especially to poetry but also to comedy,” she says, always asking herself: “What is the most true but surprising way to frame this?” And this is nowhere more evident than in the sex scenes, such as this snippet from a page-long Molly Bloomish sentence: “For a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope.…” The novel might be “as filthy as it is because of those initial years of being as pious as I was”, she laughs. “It’s course correction.”
Her experience of growing up in a small town where there were “only a handful of people of colour” is replicated in the novel. Edie feels surveilled the moment she enters suburbia, and Edie and Akila are harassed by the police, who don’t believe they live in the smart district. “Black people have been recording our reality for a long time,” she says of the Black Lives Matter moment, into which her novel has landed. “It feels like a mixed blessing that it would take so much carnage, that it would take endless footage for us to get here.” But she is hopeful “because I do feel like more people are deciding not to look away”.
She is also cautiously optimistic about Joe Biden’s victory. “These last four years have been catastrophic,” she says. She holds the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic responsible for her father’s death. “That is one thing I can take personally, a direct result of government neglect and the complete apathy this administration has for its people, especially for its people of colour. The consequences have been vast and dire.”
Luster was published after her father’s death. Both he and her brother, she says, made it possible for her to have written it: “I’m grateful that I got to show them through my work how much they both meant to me.” For the first time she is able to devote herself to writing full time, and she has “tons” of ideas for future novels. “It’s where I’m happiest,” she says. “On the page.”
• Luster by Raven Leilani is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
