Avni Doshi's second novel, The First House, is narrated by an unnamed woman in suburban US who is shocked when her husband announces he is leaving her. She isn't in love with him, but sees their marriage as a structure or “container” for her existence. Formerly a novelist, her writing has stalled since having children. Her husband controls their finances and won't explain why the credit card keeps failing. She suspects he has been unfaithful.
Aftermath of Abandonment
In the aftermath of his departure, she tries to isolate herself not only from her ex but also from her own family, whose well-meaning interference becomes another kind of domination. She is a practising astrologist – the “first house” of the title refers both to the couple's home and to the astrological division of the heavens that influences the body, physical appearance, and early life experience: foundations for a self. This self is exposed by abandonment. The First House is the story of its excoriation: a harsh, occasionally bitterly funny rejection of the narrator's personhood and relationships as they stand. Marriage, she states, requires “a terrible fear of consequences”; “if either person in a couple stopped being afraid, it would certainly break apart”. Her parents bully her. Her cousin tries to set her up with other men. Her daughter just wants a phone. Relationships, like devices, promise connection and deliver alienation. “The tight, airless room of a marriage only created the conditions for us to realise we were alone, always alone.”
Racial and Familial Dynamics
These miserable encounters extend beyond the family. The narrator's parents came to the US from India. The First House does not foreground racialisation, but it manifests in misapprehension. “It was hard to be certain of white people's ages,” the narrator drily observes. When she tells a pest control man that her family is Jain, he calls her Jane. Her older sister Didi has made a different kind of life, living with their parents, working, and having no partner or child. She buys herself diamonds and has work done on her face. As the sisters spend more time together, the narrator sees similarities between the sheltered lives they have constructed, both driven by “silent fears, and dormant desires. We wanted to be safe at any cost, in exchange for any sacrifice.”
Comparison to Burnt Sugar
Doshi's 2020 Booker-shortlisted debut novel, Burnt Sugar, also explored female fear and sacrifice. In that book, Antara, an artist in India, must care for her elderly mother Tara, who is losing her memory. Antara relates the painful, often cruel history of their relationship. The two novels are different but bear a marked resemblance. In both, Doshi takes a single intimate relationship (mother-daughter; husband-wife) and excavates it. Short scenes stitch back and forth through time, exposing wider family relations and past encounters that have shaped the relationship. There is an experience of intensification – a sense that something is gradually building or being dismantled.
Distinctive Prose and Themes
In Burnt Sugar, a story of shared memory and its failure, this method of moving action through time has a heightened ability to alter and reveal. The First House is more concerned with the present, and its core experience – a woman embroiled in extracting herself from wifehood – is familiar from other recent novels and memoirs. However, Doshi's storytelling stands out. Her prose is tooled, dense, and alert. Even a realist sentence on suburban scenery is distinct and dreamlike: “Outside, the sky above me was full of clouds and the ground below was a bed of cottonwood pollen.” The narrator is preoccupied by visceral, destructive tales of female figures from the deep past, especially a statue of the goddess Diana in a neighbour's garden. Myth, like astrology, is significant for her: these “ancient patterns” can discover or impose orderly meaning – “a chart could be a narrative”. The real world, by contrast, is chaos. Every effort to communicate is fundamentally misunderstood.
A Bid for Personal Freedom
A novel is also a form of communication, and there is urgency in the narrator's messages to her reader. “I do want liberation, not from life or death or any immense cosmic cycle but from my own fear, and the oppression of other people, their opinions, aggressions, and maybe even their love.” Her rejection of relationship is a bid for personal freedom. The First House by Avni Doshi is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99).
