A divorce can reinforce all kinds of emotional faultlines. The end of a marriage, or any meaningful relationship, can lay bare all the wounds that came before: the parents, the siblings, the inner child. Avni Doshi’s new novel, The First House, is the autopsy of a marriage that has fallen apart, and therefore of the self. The unnamed narrator is unnervingly familiar: millennial, wife, mother to two small girls, writer who is not really writing, financially dependent, deeply self-aware and therefore distraught and overwhelmed by helplessness and feeling everything too much, too viscerally.
The novel opens with the protagonist’s husband telling her their marriage of 13 years is over. She reaches for her neck and finds that “my neck is missing. My husband has cut it off surreptitiously.” She feels the air in their bedroom thin “as he fills it with justifications.” She cannot understand why he cannot understand that she cannot breathe, why he looks startled “as though he isn’t holding it right there, my head in his hands.”
Doshi is an art historian by training. And this is her second novel. Her debut, Girl in White Cotton (published abroad under the title Burnt Sugar) was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. That stunning work was an interrogation of the mother-daughter relationship. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” its narrator had opened and gone on to unpack that feeling, love and loathing. The First House flows in a similar vein. Doshi lays bare her narrator’s complicated, convoluted mental state as she makes sense of what happened all the while dissociating from it. Here too she articulates things that somehow aren’t talked directly about. It’s far tamer than the mother thing: money, that ickiness of financial asymmetry, in millennial marriages, in families and vis-à-vis creative work.
{{/usCountry}}Doshi is an art historian by training. And this is her second novel. Her debut, Girl in White Cotton (published abroad under the title Burnt Sugar) was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. That stunning work was an interrogation of the mother-daughter relationship. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” its narrator had opened and gone on to unpack that feeling, love and loathing. The First House flows in a similar vein. Doshi lays bare her narrator’s complicated, convoluted mental state as she makes sense of what happened all the while dissociating from it. Here too she articulates things that somehow aren’t talked directly about. It’s far tamer than the mother thing: money, that ickiness of financial asymmetry, in millennial marriages, in families and vis-à-vis creative work.
{{/usCountry}}The novel is set in suburban America but it could be anywhere — and although perhaps it could be anyone, any family, or any immigrant family, or Indian American family, here’s it’s a Jain family and she is able to capture that very specific complexity and rigidity of some ideas of “non-violence” and a transactional way of seeing the world.
Trying to come to terms with the end of her marriage, the narrator discloses the things that were wrong with it. Slowly, embarrassedly, she reveals the things she had chosen to not see because acknowledging them would make them real, things that she still doesn’t want to make sense of. How he deleted all his texts, kept an empty inbox — and how when she had asked him about it, he had said that apparently tech moguls do too, that he had saved, after all, all the texts from her. How she was never certain if her credit card would work, and the ways she had devised to work around the embarrassment. How she had stopped writing altogether and instead would spend her time poring over all their astrological charts — a fact that she kept from him. The shame about the selfishness that writing demands, and double the shame of choosing to be less selfish even when it’s not really a choice. She has two little girls to raise, a house to manage, a bad marriage, and writing is, after all, an impossible task.
And then come the other demons. Her parents and her sister — “They congratulated themselves for having rescued me from him, but they were the pit of vipers I’d been trying to escape all along.” She notes how often her mother has begun to visit her, “not only to see her grandchildren, but to bring back stories like discarded bones, my sister waiting to gnaw at them.” How her family could “sit together happily with my fragments, like other families worked on jigsaw puzzles.”
There’s a lot to unpack here — but every time Doshi reveals a fresh layer, she relies a little too heavily on the beauty of her writing and on symbolism. Some of the sentences here, bewitching as standalones, feel a bit meaningless. “I knew that to love each other we would all have to be monsters.”The sentiment is understandable — love being a monstrous thing — but in this context, in this family, among these people, it remains unsubstantiated. At some point, the narrator, in this disorienting haze, feels somewhat unreliable. The reader wishes Doshi had leaned into that aspect more instead; the feverishness is quite stylistic. Instead, her neuroses land as millennial tropes: there’s her obsession with astrology and some internet witchcraft. In the background run two motifs symbolizing transformation, duality and death — but that obsession with cicadas and a statue of the Roman goddess Diana is not gripping enough.
Readers will probably talk about The First House for a long time. It will come up in conversations about divorce, about Indian families, about writing, about money, about learned helplessness. It’s so real, it almost feels like a memoir. As a novel, it isn’t as satisfying.
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.