With Burnt Sugar, which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2020, Avni Doshi proved her prowess with her sharp writing and smirking wit. In her latest novel, The First House, she returns to the theme of families, their disrepair and disintegration, with her trenchant sentences and unusual insight. While her debut unspooled a mother-daughter relationship, she now pivots to a wife and husband. But she does more than that as she shows how relationships bleed into one another, how the families and values we grow up with colour the adults we become.
Reading The First House is a disorienting experience, as it moves between this world and the surreal, plunges into myths, wades into astrology, obsesses over Diana (the Roman goddess of the hunt), flirts with madness and disavows families. You titter at laconic Doshi. Her opening sentence reads, “When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married any more, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.”
You laugh when she writes, “After the anger, the screaming and the tears, the abandoned middle-aged women went one of two ways, towards witchcraft or plastic surgery.” You wonder what the swarm of cicadas—mating, breeding, dying—portends. You grimace when you read about husbands who swear at their wives, fathers who distrust and surveil their daughters, sisters who stop sleeping and bathing, mothers who have always been undermined.
But let’s start at the beginning. An unnamed woman who has long been attempting to write a book is our narrator. And an unreliable one at that. She lives in suburban US, is an NRI, her family are Jains, they have roots in Kolkata. Just as the narrator remains unnamed, so do her parents, her sister, her two daughters, aged 7 and 10, her aunt, and even the cat. This omission of names reminded me of Jhumpa Lahiri’s excellent novel Whereabouts (2021). While Lahiri moves towards abstraction, Doshi veers off the cliff. While Lahiri consoles, Doshi bewilders her reader.
The First House offers no easy explanations and leaves one with more questions than answers. You submit to the first half. But by the second half you might wonder if there are too many threads and no discernible pattern. Only to finally realise that was Doshi’s intent all along.
At first a reader will think this is a novel about the demise of a marriage and an abandoned wife picking up the pieces. The grievances, accusations, perceived slights, and the unmet needs crash between husband and wife.
Two weeks after his declaration of unhappiness, the husband decides to move out, convincing the wife that he is having an affair. We learn of their fights over money. He earns, she spends, and they hide their incomes and expenditures from each other. She tries (unsuccessfully) to hold herself together for her daughters, but they soon become aware of the empty fridge, the takeout menus, the dishevelled mother, the absent father.
The reader will rush through the first part of the novel, as they will want to know how love turns into cruelty. When and how does indifference replace intimacy? The reader and the narrator together try to make sense of the husband’s departure. Was he cheating, was there another woman, what was he hiding with his always-empty inbox and his secretive credit card bills?
Doshi is not interested in providing answers. If the wife has no answers, why should you? In the second part, she zooms out from the couple and embeds herself in the family. We learn about the rockiness of the narrator’s parents’ marriage, the father who belittles his wife, the mother who serves condiments as meals (without food). A sister who stops showering because an astrologer prophesies death by water.
A novel’s merit does not lie in the resolutions or hope it provides. The First House is a bleak book, even for a book about estrangement. One is left with the sense that marriages are mistakes, women are hapless, men are conniving and children are caught in the middle of it all. Doshi writes, “Only adults who don’t remember their own childhood fantasize about what a magical time it is. For a child, it is nothing more than a long, haunted antechamber. Children have feelings but no words for them. They know that something is wrong even though the world tells them it’s fine. That’s when they look at themselves, when they begin to think what is wrong is inside them.”
Ultimately who is wrong in the novel? Is it the selfish husband who accuses his wife of living in her own head, or the parents and sister who jeer at her ambitions, or the narrator with her failings and inadequacies? Is the end of the narrator’s marriage a catastrophe? Or a rebirth? Just as the narrator tries (vainly) to make meaning of her life, Doshi reminds us, there always remains something just beyond our grasp.
Nandini Nair is the associate director of the New India Foundation, and a literary critic.