The First House by Avni Doshi review – an intense portrait of marriage and freedom

Avni Doshi’s second novel is narrated by an unnamed woman in the suburban US who is shocked to hear her husband announce that he is leaving her. She isn’t in love with him, exactly, but she 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 tell her why the credit card keeps failing. She suspects he’s been sleeping around.

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’s 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 has a bearing on the body, physical appearance and early life experience: foundations for a self. This self is exposed by abandonment. The First House, as a whole, 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.”

These miserable encounters, or failures to encounter one another, extend beyond the family. The narrator’s parents came to the US from India. The First House doesn’t 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. Didi lives with their parents, has a job, and no partner or child. She buys herself diamonds and has work done on her face. As the sisters spend more time together, however, the narrator sees similarities between the sheltered lives they have constructed for themselves, both driven by “silent fears, and dormant desires. We wanted to be safe at any cost, in exchange for any sacrifice.”

Doshi’s 2020 Booker-shortlisted debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was also interested in 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 the relationship between the two women. The two novels are quite different but they bear a marked resemblance, like relatives. In both she takes a single intimate relationship (mother-daughter; husband-wife) and excavates it. Short scenes stitch back and forth through time, exposing the wider family relations and past encounters that have made this relationship what it is. There is an experience of intensification. As I read these novels I had a sense that something was gradually building, or being dismantled.

In Burnt Sugar, a story of shared memory and its failure, this method of moving the action back and forth through time has a heightened faculty to alter and reveal. The First House is more substantially concerned with the present, and its core experience – that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from wifehood – is familiar from several other recent novels and memoirs. However, Doshi’s storytelling stands out. Her prose is tooled, dense and alert. Even a realist sentence on the suburban scenery, which could be merely functional, is a distinct and dreamlike picture. “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 of the deep past, especially a statue of the goddess Diana that stands in a neighbour’s garden. Myth, like astrology, is significant for her: these “ancient patterns” are capable of discovering or imposing orderly meaning – “a chart could be a narrative”. The real world, by contrast, is chaos. Every effort to communicate is fundamentally misunderstood.

A novel is also a form of communication, and there is a sense of 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.