When he ghosts her for 10 days, Edie returns for answers. Though she constantly asserts, in a way that feels less convincing as the book progresses, that the “age discrepancy doesn’t bother me.”Įventually, Eric takes her to his home for sex. This is a place for children.” Their power imbalance - age, money, race, job security - courses through their interactions, causing Edie to second-guess herself. As we enter the gates, I feel the high-fructose sun of the park like an insult. They spend their first date at an amusement park and Edie observes the “Tweety Bird balloons, the plastic, soulless eyes of the Taz mascot, the Dippin’ Dots. Edie mentions only of “the happy parts” of hers.

He waxes eloquent about his rural childhood outside Milwaukee.

The book opens with a new love, Eric, a 46-year-old white archivist from the suburbs, who claims to be in an open marriage. Above all she seems deeply alone in life, though she puts a careful distance between herself and the reader: “This is not a statement of self-pity.” She wishes, above all else, to be a painter but keeps her canvasses in the closet and her longing private. Edie’s moorings have come loose in more existential ways - both her parents have died - the details of which she relays in hints and asides throughout the book. She’s hungry, but she doesn’t know how to satisfy herself. Her many liaisons at work and around town feel more like something to pass the time than desire. She works an undemanding job in publishing, lives in a crappy apartment with a barely present roommate, and drifts through life. The heart of Luster is Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman living in New York who longs to be an artist. The writer Raven Leilani evokes that intergenerational loneliness again and again in her debut novel, Luster. “This is when I realized my loneliness had deeper roots than I had initially suspected, and that, in addition to personal disappointments, it came from having a profound sense of disconnection from what I thought America was, and who, in that context, I knew myself to be.” A historical loneliness, a sense of not being a fully vested participant in the American ideal has come raging to the surface in these months of quarantine and uprising.

Walters was feeling lonely before her sojourn, but the scale of the devastation leaves her overwhelmed and numbed at the loss. Walters writes of traveling to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to help her Aunt Lou salvage what she can from her wrecked home.

IN HER ESSAY “Lonely in America,” Wendy S.

Luster raven