I enjoyed Luster. I found it interesting and beautiful in parts. I also found it strange and disconcerting. Most of all, it made me feel old. The book is about a 23-year-old who's in a relationship with a man about my age, and I felt while reading it like I was grouped in with this older, out of touch generation. (It's not just age that separates the characters, I should say: it's also race and financial security, or lack thereof, class backgrounds, childhood experiences.) I imagine it's a natural part of aging that one doesn't feel old within oneself, but that as one gets older the culture of young people -- the language they use, the way they dress, their proclivities -- feels more and more incomprehensible. This may sound strange, but I remember a moment somewhere between five and ten years ago, when clothes stopped making sense to me. I felt like the things that I understood about clothes, about how an outfit was composed, were suddenly outmoded and irrelevant, and it happened without my even noticing it. Fashion has changed again since I first had this realization, and I still find the fashion of the young rather baffling. Anyway, this novel was like that experience in book form.
The other writer I've read who is about the same age as Leilani -- and who writes about people her own age -- is Sally Rooney, and reading this reminded me a bit of reading Rooney -- particularly Conversations with Friends. (In fact, the stories are themselves rather similar now that I think about it.) I tried while reading Luster and also while reading Conversations with Friends to remember my own precarious youth, to read with those eyes. I feel like the narrators of both books have an impulse for self-destruction that I never had, and I somehow think this is generational. This isn't to say there aren't self-destructive people in my -- and in every -- generation, but perhaps that there's a fatalism among younger people that wasn't there when I was young. These narrators also have an earnestness and vulnerability that I never allowed myself, and I feel like this too is generational. This line of thought led me to google (inadvertently adding some drama to my search history as I tried to key in the exact phrases that would get me to these articles I only faintly remembered) two articles I remembered seeing some months back exploring, or explaining, the collective internet's voiced desire to be harmed by their celebrity crushes -- another element of youth culture that leaves me feeling bemused. In fact, the particular tenor of these requests by internet teens for celebrities to step on their throats -- which is familiar to me from the time I spend on Twitter, but also foreign to me in that I feel that it references some emotion or worldview that I just can't relate to -- was very like the tone of Luster. There were long stretches that read to me like dry irony, and I wondered if they were funny.
As it happens, I finished this book just in time to hear Raven Leilani talk about it on All Of It on WNYC, so maybe some of my questions will be answered today.
