Luster: A Novel

Luster: A Novel
The black and white experience.

“She might be limber, keyed into Venus retrograde, and inclined to use natural deodorant.” Page 11.

My people. Maybe not so much, but I’d like to think so.

“This is the thing with your generation. Everything is always now. There was a time when you could not reach everyone all the time.” Page 61.

The set-up is not unlike people I know, a mid-term millennial¹ matched with an early Gen-X. Then again navigating the realm of relationships, with hook-ups, marriages, dysfunctional families, and the immediacy of an app to find a potential mate? Or mistaken idea that sense of security from the exchange of messages online, having that kind of communication which feels real, but is it? False sense of intimacy?

As I was reading the novel, I realized that the prose itself has a light, airy quality, as if each word was so carefully chosen, and each word, weighed, then run together with a paragraph, the long sentences, sometimes ending, implied, with an ellipse rather than a full stop. Clever because the words themselves all dance, more like modern dance, sinewy, slowly at times, wrapping around each other.

Seems to explore a divergent number of issues. Race, relationships, race relationships.

At first, the richness of the poetic prose made me think this was a sexually sensual novel. Or an explicit sensuality that was about sex. That does little service to the animalistic, almost heathen approach in the first few pages, played out against. Backdrop of nameless social media site. The picture is that hyper-frenetic material.

“I think you need to have been alive in the eighties to like the music. I think you need a specific neural groove, a pane of nostalgia to sweeten what is sexless and extroverted and most suited for the mall.” Page 179.

While the prose is both sensual and sexual, when sexual, it’s not always sensual, and when sensual, it’s not always about sex.

Only because of my time on the planet do I even understand a smallest fraction of the pain and racial hatred mentioned, just in passing. This covers material I’ve been previously exposed to, part of the black experience, even more of an issue these days, but one I am not qualified to talk about.

I am unsure what kind of a novel it is, but the thick, luxurious, lustrous prose² alone makes it worthwhile. The topics, and apparent dark comedy, just enhances the tone and timbre of the tale.

Luster: A Novel

1. cf., 28 degrees. ↩
2. When writing my horoscopes, I have lapsed — fallen — into some tiny bits of prose that can work on the same level, but as the writer, I can only maintain that for the distance of a few signs, maybe a couple of hundred words. The novel-length is nothing of restrained and dazzling. ↩