Book Review ‘Goddess Complex’ Looks at Our Mirror Selves … and a Woman’s Purpose

The notion of a doppelgänger in literature has been used for centuries, with varying degrees of success. Think of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, materializing to haunt the tortured Denmark Prince about crimes transpired and crimes yet to be. Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, in which the double trails our hapless character through his life. There is a doppelgänger in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club. In each example, the doppelgänger reflects the yin and yang of our hero. It manifests the darkness, the bad thoughts, the roads not taken, the sliding door effect.

In Sanjena Sathian’s new novel Goddess Complex, the doppelgänger is the author herself, in much the same way Philip Roth toyed with duplicity in his masterful 1993 novel Operation Shylock: A Confession. Roth took the concept an extra step in that the main character was Philip Roth chasing after an imposter Philip Roth. In effect, the double had tripled and the result was tantamount to the famous GIF of multiple Spidermans pointing at each other, each claiming to be the original friendly neighborhood web-slinging vigilante.

This is all prelude to understanding that Goddess Complex is a deeper novel than it might seem at surface level. Certainly the doppelgänger is in full effect here, but it’s also about group of pro-natalists who overload our heroine (Sanjana Satyananda) asking for advice about procreating. What would have happened in her life if Sanjana had given birth? When we first meet her it’s been a year since she’d terminated her pregnancy and walked out on her husband Killian while at a commune in India. Her sister has a perfect life and her friends are living flawless lives as adults with stable marriages, wonderful children, and the responsibility of mortgages. Sanjana needs to move on with her life, but she can’t. Her husband is missing and she needs to track him down in India to finalize the divorce.

Sanjana is a confident character and Sathian knows how to inhabit her voice. “I am an anthropologist,” Sanjana tells us early in the novel, “...spinsters make good demons.” Sanjana is a 32-year-old, soon-to-be divorcee on medical leave from her anthropology studies. She’s looking to return, but not without tying up loose ends. Is she supposed to have a child? Is she really a “Bad brown girl,” unwilling to have children and fulfill her destiny? The struggle is real when dealing with her family:

“Whenever I called home, language failed me. How could I translate myself?”

It’s in this first of two sections, while in discussions with her therapist, that Sathian provides a clear thesis for who Sanjana is and what will happen to her:

“I wanted to shatter and be reborn as a two-dimensional, pixelated figure, wandering through these vast homes, careless, my brain shut off, my needs all met.”

Later, when discussing the legitimacy of what is or isn’t authentically alive, Sanjana’s therapist (Doctor Kim) confronts her patient. Sanjana had been fixated on plants in the office, and the Doctor’s response is telling:

“...I wonder what it says that you thought this plant life, which I’ve picked out and repotted and watered to foster a nurturing space, was a false life. As though nurture is something you feel you must reject.”

Sanjana wants to know why she is alive. It’s here where the texts start coming from what seems to be an alternate, parallel dimension, a time in which she had not left her husband and instead opted to follow expected paths in her life. Sanjana encounters Sanjena Sathian online. She’s a woman who looks like her, but we don’t know what she wants. Is she living with Killian and passing herself off as Sanjena? This is the driving force of the second section of Goddess Complex, but Sathian is still dealing with duplicity in its various forms:

“Perhaps it ran both ways; perhaps mothers and daughters were doomed to look at each other this way, not as people but as foreclosed selves.”

By the end of Part One, the premise is very clear, Sanjana has no idea how to create a new person, whether through procreation of inner emotional work. She is still confounded by the “mysterious or even repugnant desires” in people she meets. In a clear foreshadowing of what we are about to read in the novel’s second half, Sanjana makes a vow:

“As I shut the door to my childhood home, I thought: If I could be another person, I would.”

There’s a deeper strangeness in the second half of the novel that might take some adjustment for the reader to fully understand. The Sanjena Sathian conjured up in this section is “a resident of the Other Side.” Sanjana and Sanjena are preparing to meet each other but we don’t know in which form this will take place. Sanjana seeks refuge in a healing place, a resort, a place of healing where women serve as mirrors to and for each other.

It takes a while for Goddess Complex to find its footing in its second half. We know Sanjana is going to return to India. We know she needs to tie together the inner binary essence of her character. The speed and confidence of the writing just takes a while to make an impression. Sathian did a great job at word-building in the first half so her second act was going to be hard to follow. Still, it’s a strong overall text that uses the literary technique of a doppelgänger to explores the purpose and role of femininity and the essence of identity.

Sathian understands here that the content of a character can be slippery, hard to define through a straightforward narrative. In a note on research appended at the end of Goddess Complex, Sathian clearly shows her cards. She’s drawn on the history of India and its healing traditions, general sexuality, bioethics, and surrogacy, and the notion of “ghost” selves as explored in various medical texts. Who are we? What should we do? The great poet Arthur Rimbaud implored us to pay heed to our duality in an 1871 letter when he reflected:

“I is another.”