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Debby does demons Bharati Mukherjee's fine young goddess by JULIET WATERS
The story of 23-year-old Debby DiMartino's transformation into Devi Dee involves a lot of re-imagining. Before Debby is adopted by Italian-American parents from Schenectady, New York, she is saved from death in the Indian desert by Grey Nuns who name her Faustine. Sensing that she has an exotic past and a destiny too big for Schenectady, Debby decides to go in search of her biological parents.
Whatever energy Mukherjee has left over from all this reinvention seems to be directed toward mythologizing the '60s. Devi hangs out in Haight-Ashbury and meets up with an assortment of sordid middle-aged hippies trying to alternately cling to and escape their past. Even those who didn't go to Vietnam are still ostensibly wrestling with their shadow killers. And Devi becomes both witness to and apologist for "those who'd survived and owned up to what the war'd really done to them, how it'd freed them to be themselves, to curse and fuck and burn and loot, to kill or die, to feel superior while having fun." But by the end of this book our heroin has assumed so many second-hand masks that she becomes more caricature than character. More of an oversexed, overaggressive cipher than a goddess. Leave it to Me suffers from a lack of reference to the present. When Debby/Devi finally does exorcise the past, you're pretty glad to see it go. But there is room for an interesting sequel. The title of the book refers to the name of a literary PR business that Devi works for and which specializes in media escorts for successful authors. The possibility that Devi might go on to become the Heidi Fleiss of the literary world is hinted at in the last few chapters. So who knows, she may become a modern girl yet.
Leave It To Me by Bharati Mukherjee, Harper Collins, hc, $27, 239 pp |
The bio Bharati Mukherjee's Canadian publisher sent with her latest book, Leave it to Me, doesn't mention the years she lived in Montreal with her husband Clark Blaise before moving south to teach at Berkeley. And even if it did, it wouldn't change the fact that there's something inherently Californian at work in Leave it to Me. Overall, it's an entertaining novel that seems pitched toward an unquenchable thirst for the mythopoeic that may not be present in most Canadian readers.
En route to San Francisco she renames herself Devi, from a name she sees on a license plate. But the name also refers to a myth told in the novel's prologue of a Hindu goddess charged with slaying an evil buffalo demon. By implication, Debby is Devi's modern day incarnation. Playing the part of the contemporary buffalo demon is Debby/Devi's natural-born-serial-killer father, Romeo Hawk, whose eventual demise brings on allusions to the Electra myth.