First House Review by Avni Doshi – An Intense Portrait of Marriage and Freedom | imaginary

Avni Doshi’s second novel is narrated by an unnamed woman in a US suburb who is shocked to hear her husband announce that he is leaving her. She’s not exactly in love with him, but she sees their marriage as a structure or “container” for her existence. She was previously a novelist, and has stopped writing since having children. Her husband controls their finances, and doesn’t tell her why the credit card keeps failing. She suspects he was sleeping.

In the wake of his departure, she tries to isolate herself not only from her ex-husband, but also from her family, whose well-intentioned interference becomes another kind of domination. She is a practicing astrologer – the ‘first house’ in the title refers to the couple’s home and to the astrological division of the sky that has an impact on the body, physical appearance and early life experience: the foundations of the self. This self is revealed by abandonment. The first verse, as a whole, is the story of his harsh criticism: a harsh, and at times very funny, rejection of the narrator’s character and relationships as they were. Marriage, she says, requires “a terrible fear of consequences.” “If either spouse stops being afraid, they will definitely break up.” Her parents bully her. Her cousin tries to set her up with other men. Her daughter just wants the phone. Relationships, like devices, promise connection and bring alienation. “The narrow, airless marriage room created the conditions for us to realize that we are alone, always alone.”

These miserable encounters, or failure to stand up to each other, extend beyond the family. The narrator’s parents came to the United States from India. The first verse does not highlight racism, but it manifests itself in misunderstanding. “It was difficult to ascertain the ages of the white people,” the narrator notes dryly. When she tells the pest control man that her family is Jane, he calls her Jane.

Her older sister, Didi, has achieved a different kind of life. Didi lives with his parents, has a job, and does not have a partner or child. She buys herself diamonds and gets plastic surgery on her face. As the sisters spend more time together, the narrator sees parallels between the sheltered lives they built for themselves, both driven by “silent fears, dormant desires. We wanted to be safe at any cost, at any sacrifice.”

Doshi’s debut novel shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Burnt Sugar, was also concerned with female fear and sacrifice. In this book, Antara, an Indian artist, has to take care of her elderly mother, Tara, who is losing her memory. Antara recounts the painful and often cruel history of the relationship between the two women. The two novels are very different but bear remarkable similarities, like relatives. In both, you take one intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife) and dig it up. Short scenes interweave back and forth through time, revealing the broader family relationships and past encounters that made this relationship what it is now. There is an experience of condensation. When I read these novels, I had the feeling that something was gradually being built, or being dismantled.

In Burnt Sugar, the story of shared memory and its failure, this way of moving action back and forth across time has a powerful potential to change and reveal. The first verse is fundamentally concerned with the present, and its basic experience—that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from marriage—is familiar from many other recent novels and memoirs. However, Doshi’s account stands out. Her prose is prepared, dense, and attentive. Even the matter-of-fact sentence about the suburban scene, which can only be functional, is a distinct dream-like image. “Outside, the sky above me was full of clouds, and the ground below was a layer of cottonwood pollen.”

The narrator is preoccupied with the profound and devastating tales of female characters from the deep past, especially the statue of the goddess Diana that stands in a neighbor’s garden. Myth, like astrology, is important to her: these “archaic patterns” are able to discover or impose structured meaning – “a chart can be a narrative.” The real world, by contrast, is chaos. Every effort to communicate is fundamentally misunderstood.

Fiction is also a form of communication, and there is a sense of urgency in the narrator’s letters to her reader. “I want freedom, not from life or death or any vast cosmic cycle, but from my own fear, other people’s oppression, opinions, attacks, and perhaps even their love.” Her rejection of the relationship is an attempt at personal freedom.