Can Black Literature Escape the Representation Trap?
nytimes.comWhen I first read Raven Leilani’s 2020 debut novel, “Luster,” it struck me as both more middling and more strange than many of its reviews made it out to be.
In a post-Sally Rooney, post-Black Lives Matter landscape, it scanned as a savvy fusion of millennial economic anxiety and the roiling racial tensions that had lately become of such interest to the publishing industry.
Its protagonist, Edie, is a 23-year-old painter and low-level employee at a New York publisher. She is fired and stumbles into an affair with Eric, a married older white man whose family she winds up living with, perversely, at the behest of Eric’s wife, Rebecca.
This isn’t an act of selfless charity — the couple’s adopted daughter, Akila, is a Black girl who they worry is having a tough time in their white world.
