Painting is political in Luster, too, and the central struggle in the book is the tug of war between making art and survival, a tension which has taken root in her own life. "I want you to feel what it feels like to stretch a canvas, to clean the brushes and peel the paint off the palette with the knife." Like Edie, she too is a painter, a discipline which showed her, "what it feels like to really love a craft and have to face up to your own personal limits." This passion for the craft seeps into the pages of Luster, so much so that after finishing the book it feels as though you have been staring at a painting for hours. "Painting is so deeply physical," Leilani says. This fixation with the body is mirrored in the art that Edie slowly begins to make again after a long period of retreat, her canvases filled with crumpled faces and bodies which are "muddy and full of nerves".
Their relationship is carnal, both in its depiction of sex, where Eric, "hooks his fingers and pulls me toward him by the bottom row of my teeth", but also in Edie's desire to "show him all the ooze inside" her. Eric and his ordinary suburban wife and home security system are alien to Edie's life in a mouse-infested Bushwick flat where she mourns her mother and laments her lack of creative fulfilment. Eric is the latter, and Luster fizzes in the process of that slow dissolve and the bitter tang it brings.
"There are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve," Edie ponders at one point. The first seed of Luster is protagonist Edie meeting Eric, a married man with a "vaguely paternal old man frown" who she discovers on a dating app, leading to an awkward first date at a theme park. "There has been very real dissonance between the joy of this book or the relief I feel around its reception and the family stuff I’ve had going on in the background," says Leilani, who has been surprised by the reaction to the book having managed her expectations of success. When we speak it is the week of Thanksgiving in a year which has brought her extreme grief but also sublime joy. In March she lost her father to Covid-19 and several months later her terminally ill brother died. It is a strange year for anyone to be flourishing, but for Leilani the disconnect between creative success and personal pain in 2020 has been profound. With the book due to be published in the UK in January, Leilani is now a New York Times–bestselling author and, as of this month, the recipient of The Center for Fiction first novel prize.
Luster earned 30-year-old Leilani critical acclaim when it was published in America earlier this year, with Leilani's former New York University professor Zadie Smith offering a rapturous jacket quote which calls the book "brutal and brilliant".
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