Leave It to Me (27 page)

Q:   What changes do you anticipate in your writing or in the projects you undertake?

BM: I never anticipate. The changes emerge, in spite of myself. At any given time, my head is crowded with characters who shout out their stories. Right now I’m working on two projects: a book of stories that I am tentatively titling
Happiness
, and a novel about three sisters, much like us three Mukherjee sisters, and the very different choices they make in adult life.

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. What attitude does
   Leave It to Me
   take toward adoption? How do you feel when Faustine/Debby/Devi abandons the DiMartinos so early in the novel?
   

2. When Debby starts her search for her “other life, [her]
   real
   life,” Serena DiMartino tells her daughter that her biological father had a police record. Debby recognizes that a police record will help her find her bio-parents:
   

   “That’s a break for me, Mama. If they had a police record, that’s something to go on.”
   

   “Being a criminal is a break? What kind of talk is that?”
   

   “Just kidding, Mama. You brought me up to be decent.”
   

   The dialogue suggests that Debby’s search for her bio-parents might prove to be “indecent.” Does it? How does Debby feel about abandoning stable Schenectady society to embrace the Haight’s counterculture? How do you feel about it?
   

3. In the first conversation between Ham and Devi, Ham remarks, “You have to come up with just the right name.… Names count.” In what ways do names count in
   Leave It to Me
   ? Why are names constantly being changed? mispronounced? misunderstood? Originally named Faustine “after a typhoon,” Debby renames herself after a Hindu goddess, Devi. Why? What impact does changing her name have on her identity?
   
4. Despite this interest in her own name, Devi seems to seek out employment in which her name and identity simply don’t matter. First, she works as a telemarketer for Frankie Fong where she “tried out thirty personas” nightly. Later, she works for Jess DuPree’s Leave It to Me knowing that “A ME doesn’t have personal problems. A ME doesn’t have a life.” Why does Devi want these kinds of jobs? Does this work bring her closer to or drive her farther away from discovering her real identity, her real “me”?
   
5. Why is the novel titled
   Leave It to Me
   ? What is left up to Devi to accomplish? Does she accomplish what she needs to?
   
6. When Devi reveals to Frankie Fong how little she knows about herself, she makes a statement intended for Frankie, but heard only by the reader: “I want you to know that we’ve both invented ourselves.” What does Devi mean? Later in their relationship, Frankie actually turns Devi into a secretary, while Devi recognizes that she has “made [Frankie] up out of needs I didn’t know I had.” Is identity always “invented”? What are the dangers of inventing identity, one’s own or someone else’s?
   
7. Devi tries to leave her Schenectady past behind when she enters California. However, the individuals she meets seem vaguely familiar. Gabe, a neighbor, “looked like Wyatt, and kind of talked like Wyatt, too.” Devi immediately recognizes that Ham Cohan’s film series is a “rip-off of Flash’s
   Boss Tong of Hong Kong
   .” Is Gabe a second Wyatt? Is Ham a second Flash? Is, Devi able to abandon her past, or is this entrance into California a reincarnation not only of herself, but of her past as well?
   
8. While working at Leave It to Me, Devi encounters several individuals who, unlike Frankie, seem to know exactly who they are. Devi’s describes Stark Swann as a man who is comfortably “the center of his universe.” Devi seduces and drugs Stark in order to carve “an endearment on his left buttock: CW. My homage to my neighborhood
   graffitiste
   , Cee-Double-You.” “CW” expresses Devi’s critique of Swann’s tendency to see (Cee) only a reflection of himself (Double-You) in everyone he meets. She insists that her revenge is an act of the “real women.” What does she mean by “real women”? Does Devi achieve real woman status in the novel? Does this mean that she does in fact have an identity that cannot be manipulated by someone else?
   
9. Devi hires Fred Pointer to point the way to her parents. The evidence that piles up to prove that her parents are Jess DuPree and Romeo Hawk seems officially convincing: conversation transcripts, death notices, court records, a photograph, passports. Romeo claims his daughter immediately. Jess, however, denies her relationship to Devi to the novel’s end. Is Devi ever able to feel certain about her parentage? Are you?
   
10. “When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything: that’s the Devi Dee philosophy.” Devi’s search for her identity reveals remarkable similarities between herself and her bio-parents. Devi and Jess both seduce the same man, work at the same job, and drug inconvenient lovers with Mandrax. Devi and Romeo wield the same cleaver to violent ends. Are these similarities a result of Devi’s inheritance or her entitlement? Is she responsible for her actions? Do you excuse her because of her parentage, because of the actions of her bio-parents, or not at all?
    
11. Sex complicates Devi’s relationships with her bio-parents. What impact does the fact that Jess and Devi share a lover have upon Devi’s attempts to relate to Jess as a mother? Why does her bio-father, Romeo, enter Devi’s life dressed as a woman? Why does he undress “with the taunting efficiency of a professional stripper” to reveal to his daughter that he is actually a man?
    
12. Devi believes that her search for her own identity was “started” by a poem. She discovers her bio-Dad by reading “poetic
    pernees
    ,” and believes that she hears the story of her conception while listening to Jess quote an Emily Dickinson verse:
    “My beginning.… I’ve just heard my beginning
    .” Later Devi realizes that her life reflects a “romance novel off a rack” more than an Emily Dickinson poem. Still, her identity seems to reflect literary productions: poems, romances, movies. How does Devi discover her identity through literature? Do you think of Devi as a real person or as a literary creation—a myth/fantasy?
    
13. In the prologue of
    Leave It to Me
    old Hari tells the children a bedtime story in which the Hindu goddess Devi slays the Buffalo Demon. Despite the disturbing violence of old Hari’s tale, the children are “comforted by story” and “curl into sleep.” They aren’t troubled by the violence because they “already know the story’s ending,” and because it is story and not reality. The novel is just as violent as the prologue. Are you troubled by the violence of the novel, or does it leave you, like the children, comforted? In what ways does the violent prologue foreshadow the novel?
    
14. Why does
    Leave It to Me
    include a catalogue of acts of violence, seemingly unrelated to the story, that reads as realistically as a newspaper?
    
15. In the promotional material that introduces Devi to Romeo Hawk, Devi discovers a potent one-liner: “Destruction is creation’s necessary prelude.” What does this mean? Does the violence in
    Leave It to Me
    lead to creation?
    
16. Devi travels to Berkeley to find her bio-parents, but once she arrives she realizes that she can’t enter “that Berkeley” in which Ham and Jess live. Devi suggests that it is the Vietnam War that separates “
    that
    Berkeley” from the place she visits: “Vietnam wasn’t a war; it was a divide. On one side, the self-involved idealists; on the other, we the napalm-scarred kids”? How does the war shape Devi’s experiences? Do the war veterans—Loco Larry, Pete Cuvo, Chuck Stanko—act in ways that she can or can’t understand? Why does she ally herself with the napalm-scarred kids? Do her actions demonstrate this alliance?
    
17. Ham’s houseboat is called
    Last Chance
    . What last chance does it represent? Does Devi lose this last chance or take advantage of it at the conclusion of the novel?
    
18. Only the conclusion reveals that the novel begins exactly where it ends: “in the cabin of this houseboat off Sausilito as curtains of flame dance in the distance and a million flashbulbs burn and fizzle, and I sit with the head of a lover on my lap.” Why does the novel begin at its ending? How does this impact the way you think about Devi’s experience?
    

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

B
HARATI
M
UKHERJEE
was born in Calcutta, India. Shortly after India won Independence from Britain, she, with her parents and two sisters, left her Brahmin Bengali life in Calcutta for Europe where she traveled, schooled, and learned English. Returning to Calcutta in 1951, she attended an English-speaking convent school before taking her B.A. in English at the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M. A. in English and ancient Indian culture at the University of Baroda in 1961. In the fall of 1961, she left India to pursue her education in the United States where she attended the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop on a P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship. After being awarded an M.F.A., Mukherjee began her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. She completed this degree in 1969, an accomplishment which, she has suggested, finalized her separation from the “world of passive privilege” of her youth: “An M. A. in English is considered refined, but a doctorate is far too serious a business, indicative more of brains than beauty, and likely to lead to a quarrelsome nature.”

During her tenure at the University of Iowa, Mukherjee met and married fellow writer Clark Blaise. Mukherjee and Blaise are the parents of two sons, Bart and Bernard. In 1966, Blaise encouraged their move to Canada where they
lived for the next fourteen years. Settling in Montreal, Mukherjee taught English at McGill University and published her first two novels,
The Tiger’s Daughter
(1972) and
Wife
(1975). She and Blaise coauthored a work of nonfiction,
Days and Nights in Calcutta
(1977), which chronicled their experiences during a sabbatical year spent together in India. Although professionally successful during these years, Mukherjee was burdened by the prejudice she encountered. As she wrote in her 1981
Saturday Night
article, “The Invisible Woman,” shortly after leaving Canada: “In Montreal, I was, simultaneously, a full professor at McGill, an author, a confident lecturer, and (I like to think) a charming and competent hostess and guest—and a housebound, fearful, aggrieved, obsessive, and unforgiving queen of bitterness. Whenever I read articles about women committing suicide … I knew I was looking into a mirror.”

Mukherjee left this atmosphere of prejudice in 1980 to return to the United States where she continued her teaching career with positions at the University of Iowa, Skidmore College, Queens College, New York, and Columbia University. During these years she published two collections of short stories,
Darkness
(1985) and
The Middleman and Other Stories
(1988), which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as her third novel,
Jasmine
(1989). She and Blaise coauthored their second work of nonfiction,
The Sorrow and the Terror
(1987), an investigation of the 1985 Air India bombing. In 1989 Mukherjee was awarded a Distinguished Professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. While teaching at Berkeley, she has completed her latest two novels,
The Holder of the World
(1993) and
Leave It to Me
(1997), and has commenced work on a third collection of short stories as well as her sixth novel.

Excerpts from reviews of Bharati Mukherjee’s
Leave It to
Me

“Mukherjee combines the journalist’s grasp of contemporary culture with the magic realist’s appetite for myth.… Her book is a hybrid of history and gossip, of high and low culture.”

—
The Boston Globe

“In
Leave It to Me
, Mukherjee takes the themes she has previously explored a step further. Destroying the concept of ethnicity altogether, she creates a complex new, transnational definition of self.… Devi
will
know who she is no matter what or whom she has to destroy. But the discovery does not prove to be easy in a region where ethnic boundaries slide over each other like snakes in a basket and many people have discarded the names they were born with.… The novel becomes a meditation on the Indian concept of karma and the Greek idea of destiny.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“Some readers will see in it visionary vengeance on American hubris, a triumph of alien genes, Devi as a force of nature. Yet it also seems to contain a mocking attack on the very notion of speaking for outsiders. Devi suffers from multiple personality disorder—and what’s more Western than that?… Devi Dee … merges fearlessly with the human flotsam and jetsam.… When she identifies with people she steals their life stories, or at least the bits she wants. She’s a psychic scavenger.”

—
The New York Times Book Review