On their first date, at an amusement park, Edie finds Eric’s abject joy “raw in a way that makes me feel like I can unzip my skin suit and show him all the ooze inside.” After a month of seeing each other, meticulously following the rules set forth by Eric’s wife (Eric must always pick up when Rebecca calls Edie and Eric get tested for S.T.D.s together), they finally have clumsy, domestic sex in his bedroom when Rebecca is out of town. Like Edie, Leilani has a ruthless knack for the somatic, rendering flesh on paper as alluring and unidealized as it is right next to you. His “retired internet slang” and earnestness are, “compared to the inscrutable advances of younger men, … a relief.” In his first message, he tells her he’s in an open marriage. But then she meets Eric, a white digital archivist twice her age, on a dating website, and she is charmed by the softness of his profile pictures, the ease with which they discuss the uglier parts of life. He leads her on not just romantically but professionally, encouraging her artistic interests - Edie is a painter - threading her hope that she can move out of editorial and into visual work for the company, but dumping her after her mother dies. During the day, her publishing job provides her with barely enough money to get by at night, it feeds her with a cast of sexual partners - “What they say about not where you eat only holds if they pay you enough to eat,” she thinks - including one man for whom she thaws into true affection. Her Bushwick walk-up reeks of fish, or broccoli mice and roaches live alongside her and her roommate. Edie is a 23-year-old New Yorker dissatisfied with everything. Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill. “Whew” to the first breeze from the air-conditioning unit in my bedroom window on a steamy morning, “whew” to a truth that keeps finding me despite my constant dodging, “whew” to “Luster.” “Whew” to the woman one recent morning in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, as immersed in her phone as I was in the gentle lift of her calf down her golden brown leg. Whenever I, a person raised both Christian and corny, encounter something truly sinful - so delicious that it feels illicit too much, but sneak me a little more when no one’s looking - I feel a need to remark on it with a “whew.” “Whew,” expressed in the side text to the group text, about one friend’s response to another that was slightly too cutting but hurt in the way it needed to.

Luster raven leilani