![]() She’s a sexual adventuress of a joyless sort, not looking for love so much as a kind of annihilation, an escape from the self - “ecstatic rutting and cushy ether of the void,” as she puts it. Not that she’s especially engaged with her 9-to-5 she marshals her real creative energy for sleeping with her male colleagues. She’s a spectacularly disabused and skeptical 23-year-old Black woman, an assistant book editor, wise to the industry’s excesses. It’s a book that has been so feverishly praised for its boldness, humor and sexual frankness that I was a little crushed to find instead a perfectly agreeable if uneven first novel - brisk and pleasantly pulpy, hobbled occasionally by some seriously mangled prose and pat psychology.Įdie, the protagonist of “Luster,” would never have allowed this to happen. ![]() Take “Luster,” by Raven Leilani, perhaps the summer’s most touted debut. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice. ![]() The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. ![]() Perhaps publishing has a parallel call it the blurb theory. You may know of the hemline theory - the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. ![]()
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