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Leave It to Me

Name: Leave It to Me
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
ISBN: 9780449003961

by Bharati Mukherjee

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Overview

"A very fine writer, funny, intelligent, versatile and, on occasion, unexpectedly profound."
--The Washington Post Book World

"MUKHERJEE IS FEARLESS . . . DARING AND WITTY . . . Take the wild ride with Debby DiMartino from Albany to San Francisco, from lost child to masked avenger."
--The Boston Globe

"POWERFULLY WRITTEN . . . Debby has no memory of her birth parents. All she knows is that she was born in a remote Indian village, the daughter of a hippie back-packing mother and a mysterious Eurasian father, both of whom have disappeared almost without a trace. . . . Her quest for her biological parents turns into an obsession. . . . Leave It to Me . . . shows Mukherjee at the peak of her craft. . . . Mixing the Greek myth of Electra with the Indian myth of Devi, she sends Devi/Debby careening down on the Bay Area like an elemental force of vengeance."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"DEVI IS A BRILLIANT CREATION--hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious--through whom Bharati Mukherjee, with characteristic and shameless ingenuity, is laying claim to speak for an America that isn't 'other' at all."
--The New York Times Book Review

"STUNNING . . . An astute, ironic, and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Synopsis

Debby DiMartino: saved from death in infancy by Gray Nuns at an Indian desert outpost; adopted as a toddler by Manfred and Serena DiMartino of Schenectady, New York; coming of age an inherently exotic girl in an inherently American town, never sure if she was someone special or just a special kind of misfit. Now, at 23, she's decided that it's time to find out: time to track down her biological parents. She knows only the barest facts about them: her mother was a California flower child; her father, an 'Asian national' serving life in an Indian prison for murder. She knows that they were 'lousy people who'd considered me lousier still and who'd left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the mangy shade.' Her only inheritance from them is a literally haunting past ('white-hot sky and burnt-black leaves...star bursts of yearning'), but now she wants revenge too. 'When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything,' Debby says as she leaves home for San Francisco, where, if she can't find her mother, she suspects she can appropriate what she needs. Yet, once there, living the life of her newly named persona, Devi Dee ("Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence'), she senses that she may have inherited more than she imagined: a legacy of shocking idea and impulse begins to reveal itself as Debby/Devi focuses her sights on the woman who may be her 'bio-mom,' or just a dangerously unprepared proxy.

New York Times Book Review - Lorna Sage

. . .[A] brilliant creation — hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious.

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Editorials

Lorna Sage

. . .[A] brilliant creation — hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious.
—New York Times Book Review

San Francisco Chronicle

Powerfully written...Mukherjee at the peak of her craft.

The Boston Globe

Mukherjee is fearless....Daring and witty....Take the wild ride with Debby DiMartino from Albany to San Francisco, from lost child to masked avenger.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A native of India who has lived in Canada and the U.S. for many years, Mukherjee (Jasmine) writes about people who are outsiders in our society. Debbie Di Martino, the narrator of this stunning novel, is outwardly mainstream. She lives with her Italian-American parents in Schenectady, NY, but she was adopted, and needs to find her true indentity. After a failed love affair with an Asian entrepreneur in which Debbie discovers an inner streak of violence, she flees to San Francisco, where she knows her 'bio-mom' lived. Changing her name to Devi, she settles in the seedy environs of Haight-Ashbury among a colony of outcasts and losers, including a psychologically maimed Vietnam vet. Soon, she becomes the lover of wealthy filmmaker Hamilton Cohan and, through him, is drawn into a circle of ex-hippies who have abandoned social protest for making money. Mukherjee is inspired here in connecting the residues of 1960s culture: the self-described idealists who used civil disobedience as a road to selfish excess; the scarred veterans of Vietnam; and, between them, the damaged children of that generation. She's especially adroit in recalling the Berkeley counterculture and capturing its later expression in the alternative lifestyles and self-serving rationales with which ex-hippies defend their current lives. Her most impressive feat, however, is in rendering her self-destructive heroine with brilliant fidelity to the American vernacular. Profane, brash and amoral, Debbie/Devi is not likable, but she is recognizable and true. Her voice is flippant but vulnerable, wired with neediness and burning with desperate anger. Some readers may find their credulity stretched by the novel's final scene of vicious mayhem. The bloodbath that ends the book has been signaled from the beginning, however, and one must credit Mukherjee with an astute, ironic and merciless insight into an aberrant version of the American dream.

Library Journal

Uncontrolled violence has a disturbingly prominent place in Mukherjee's new novel, as it does in much of her writing (The Holder of the World). The main character and narrator, Debby DiMartino, was born in India to a California flower child and a Eurasian serial killer. Having been adopted by an Italian American family in New Jersey, Debby, now in her 20s, begins to investigate her origins. She changes her name to Devi after seeing it on a vanity license plate but never learns that she has taken the name of a Hindu deity. Devi, who manifests her ancient namesake's fierce and destructive nature, also ironically exemplifies the morally shallow, me-centered prototype of the present day. She alone survives the devastation she causes by trying to identify her 'bio-parents.' -- Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell College Libraries, Iowa

Library Journal

Lorna Sage

. . .[A] brilliant creation -- hilarious, horribly knowing and even more horribly oblivious. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Mukherjee (The Holder of the World) probes the origins of violence and the nature of identity in this grim tale of a young woman whose need to know her past leaves corpses from Sarasota to Sausalito. Debby DiMartino grows up in Schenectady thinking herself no different from her adopted family, until after college, when her telemarketing skills suddenly earn her the attention of her Asian boss. Debby's thirst for his knowledge of the Far East after becoming his lover forces them both to realize that she is more than she appears—an understanding that's borne out when he dumps her and, furious, she burns down his Sarasota mansion. Desperate to find out more about the impulses behind her lethal behavior, which she believes must lie in her past, Debby flees. Knowing only that her real mother was a flower child from Fresno and that she gave birth in India, she heads west. Ending up in San Francisco, she quickly changes her name to Devi and slips easily into that city's street culture. An encounter with a well-connected movie-location Romeo, also a `60s type, allows her to make fast progress in her quest. His friend, a detective, gives her enough information to zero in on 'Bio-Mom,' who proves to be a lover of both the movie guy and the P.I., but the news about Dad is all bad: An Asian serial strangler, locked up in an Indian prison for life after Mom turned him in, he is thought to have recently died. When Devi starts working for her unsuspecting mother's escort service, things turn violent with a vengeance. The detective is murdered, a crazy Vietnam vet turned Devi-devotee kills two women who get in his way, and then Dad shows up dressed in drag and ready for revenge. Theearth literally trembles as the killing escalates. The mythic overtones keep this bloody saga engaging as its Electra proves worthy of the zeitgeist that created her.