Review of The First House by Avni Doshi – a powerful portrait of marriage and independence | Fiction

Avni Doshi’s second novel is narrated by an unnamed rural US woman who is shocked to hear her husband announce that he is leaving her. She is not in love with him, exactly, but she sees their marriage as a bond or “container” of his existence. Formerly a novelist, his writing has stopped since he had children. Her husband controls their finances, and won’t tell her why the credit card is failing. He suspects that he has been sleeping.

After his departure he tries to distance himself, not only from his ex-wife, but also from his own family, whose interference with good intentions becomes a form of control. He is an astrologer – the “first house” of the subject refers to the house of the family and the division of the stars in the sky that affect the body, the appearance of the body and the events of childhood: the foundation of the individual. This person is exposed and abandoned. The First House, as a whole, is an interesting story: a fierce, sometimes very funny rejection of the narrator’s personality and the relationships he represents. He said that marriage requires “great fear of its consequences”; “If someone in the family stops being afraid, it can break”. His parents bully him. Her cousin tries to set her up with other men. Her daughter just wants a phone. Relationships, like tools, promise connection and offer distance. “The cramped, airless marriage room only made us realize that we were alone, alone all the time.”

This tragic encounter, or lack of encounter, continues in the family. The narrator’s parents came to the US from India. The First House does not lead to discrimination, but it does show misunderstanding. “It was difficult to know the age of the white people,” said the narrator boldly. When she tells the pest control man that her family is Jain, he calls her Jane.

His sister Didi has led a different life. Didi lives with their parents, has a job, and has no boyfriend or children. She buys herself a diamond and has work done on her face. However, as the sisters spend more time together, the narrator sees parallels between the safe lives they have built for themselves, both driven by “silent fears, and sleeping desires.

Doshi’s 2020 Booker-authored summary, Burnt SugarHe was also interested in women and sacrifices. In that book, Antara, an Indian artist, must take care of her elderly mother, Tara, who is losing her memory. Antara tells the painful, often brutal history of the relationship between the two women. The two books are very different but have similar features, like relatives. In both cases, they take one intimate relationship (mother and daughter; husband and wife) and dig it up. Small scenes go back and forth, showing many of the family relationships and past events that have made this relationship what it is. There is an intensification event. As I read these books I felt that something was slowly being built up, or taken away.

In Burnt Sugar, a story of shared memory and its failure, this method of moving events back and forth through time has the added power to transform and reveal. The First House is very much concerned with current events, and the story behind it – that of a woman who takes desperate steps to get out of her marriage – is familiar from several other recent novels. However, the legends of Doshi are well known. His voice is instrumented, thick and alert. Even the truest sentence on the countryside, which can only work, is a familiar and dream-like image. “Outside, the sky above me was full of clouds and below it was a bed of cotton pollen.

The narrator is obsessed with the destructive, destructive myths of ancient women, especially the statue of the goddess Diana that stands in the neighbor’s garden. Mythology, like astrology, is important to him: these “old systems” can identify or put a systematic meaning – “a chart can be a story”. The world itself, by contrast, is chaos. Every effort to communicate is misunderstood.

The book also has a communication style, and there is a sense of urgency in the narrator’s messages to his readers. “I want to be freed, not from life or death or great changes in nature but from my fear, and oppression by other people, their thoughts, violence, and maybe their love.” His rejection of relationship and desire for personal freedom.