Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [81]
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?
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?
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?
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?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BHARATI MUKHERJEE 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