The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Leave It to Me by Bharati Mukherjee
Ellen G. Friedman

Bharati Mukherjee. Leave It to Me. 288 pp. Knopf, 1997. $23.00.

Bharati Mukherjee’s ninth novel, Leave it to Me, resembles a Hollywood thriller fantasy: an orphan, adopted by a hardworking, religious couple in upstate New York is transformed from Debby DiMartino who telemarkets Elastonomics in Schenectady, to Devi Dee, named after the many-armed Hindu goddess, who uses fire, an ax, and a well-timed earthquake to wreck vengeance on the fabulously rich and interesting evil people, some of them Asian, who betray her. This cartoon plot is quick and complicated, and the pages turn almost faster than one can read.
The orphan plot is quintessentially American. Many postmodern American protagonists and poetic personae, as they used to call them when I was a student, are literal, virtual, or metaphorical orphans, on a futile search for home, father, and origins. Mukherjee’s Leave it to Me varies this paradigm in ways worth paying attention to. Devi Dee, unlike her modernist oedipal counterparts, is a female looking for her mother. In San Francisco she finds the ex-hippie flower child whom she presumes is her “Bio-Mom” and, Electra-like, abets her murder, as well as has sex with the man she believes is her “Bio-Dad.” When he is ax-murdered by the mother’s former lover who has also killed her mother, she returns the favor. As the police make their way to the crime scene, an earthquake diverts their attention and she escapes them. She rides out the earthquake bobbing up and down in the crime scene, a boat in the waters off Sausalito, the location from which she begins to tell us her story.
A female, post-Freudian, new-millennium Huckleberry Finn, Devi Dee is one of a small but growing list of female protagonists who navigate through their plots mostly alone and under their own steam and emerge at the end triumphant to some degree, without parents or men deciding their fates. Add to that the multiraced cast of characters and you have a novel of new realism, postfeminist and postcanonical American narratology. [Ellen G. Friedman]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Leave It to Me by Bharati Mukherjee Ellen G. Friedman Bharati Mukherjee. Leave It to Me. 288 pp. Knopf, 1997. $23.00. Bharati Mukherjee’s ninth novel, Leave it to Me, resembles a Hollywood thriller fantasy: an orphan, adopted by a hardworking, religious couple in upstate New York is transformed from Debby DiMartino who telemarkets Elastonomics in Schenectady, to Devi Dee, named after the many-armed Hindu goddess, who uses fire, an ax, and a well-timed earthquake to wreck vengeance on the fabulously rich and interesting evil people, some of them Asian, who betray her. This cartoon plot is quick and complicated, and the pages turn almost faster than one can read. The orphan plot is quintessentially American. Many postmodern American protagonists and poetic personae, as they used to call them when I was a student, are literal, virtual, or metaphorical orphans, on a futile search for home, father, and origins. Mukherjee’s Leave it to Me varies this paradigm in ways worth paying attention to. Devi Dee, unlike her modernist oedipal counterparts, is a female looking for her mother. In San Francisco she finds the ex-hippie flower child whom she presumes is her “Bio-Mom” and, Electra-like, abets her murder, as well as has sex with the man she believes is her “Bio-Dad.” When he is ax-murdered by the mother’s former lover who has also killed her mother, she returns the favor. As the police make their way to the crime scene, an earthquake diverts their attention and she escapes them. She rides out the earthquake bobbing up and down in the crime scene, a boat in the waters off Sausalito, the location from which she begins to tell us her story. A female, post-Freudian, new-millennium Huckleberry Finn, Devi Dee is one of a small but growing list of female protagonists who navigate through their plots mostly alone and under their own steam and emerge at the end triumphant to some degree, without parents or men deciding their fates. Add to that the multiraced cast of characters and you have a novel of new realism, postfeminist and postcanonical American narratology. [Ellen G. Friedman]

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