Luster is a cold, hard look at life in a dirty 21st-century metropolis for a struggling young woman craving stability and tenderness, caught mercilessly at the intersection of capitalism, racism and sexism. There is no sing-song, no exotic humming to be imagined in the background. Here this word definitely does not apply.
Other descriptions often applied to this kind of writing are “ornate”, “decorative” and, too frequently around the work of black women, “lyrical”. And then there are the writers who live in the cathedral, who make sentences as an act of worship to the feats that words are capable of – I’m thinking of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison and Mary Gaitskill, who has hailed American newcomer Raven Leilani’s debut novel as “a lustrous piece of art”. Others give it a little more room, so that language and story walk in tandem. Some step over it to serve a plot, the electric possibilities of the words themselves kept in check or indeed unnoticed. W riters treat language in different ways.
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