THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel, when you lose your head, find Diana, and gain a billion cicadas

THE FIRST HOUSE: A Novel
AVNI DOSHI
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar comes a riveting novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family.

When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.

A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two children in the house they built together, reeling at this forced recasting of the story of their marriage. Everything becomes an encounter at the grocery store, a looming cicada horde, a statue of Diana that suddenly appears in her neighbor’s yard. Or was it always there?

As she wades through the aftermath of her marriage, her complicated family resurfaces. Although close to her parents, her relationship with them is strained, and she is fully estranged from her older sister—the perfect daughter—who still lives at home and always disapproved of her husband. So when did the trouble begin? And where will she go from here?

When she was a child, an astrologer in India told her parents that the family would die in water. Ever since, they’ve avoided pools and lakes and the ocean; no one ever learned to swim. From the Booker finalist and beloved author of Burnt Sugar comes a brilliant story of betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, of a woman spiraling who swims to the other side and comes up for air.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have had the experience of learning, abruptly, that I was having a different relationship than my partner was, while we were still having it. It is...disorienting, to put it mildly. What did I miss? is on a loop in the broken-up-with one's head. What happened, what did I do, what can I do...unanswerable because if the answer was in you, you would've seen it, probably would've stopped it from reaching the breaking point...like the way he refuses to to discuss why her credit card keeps failing, where it is he disappears to. I don't think I really need to belabor these points since Author Doshi doesn't.

Knowing you're not in love with someone several children into a marriage isn't an unusual state of affairs...happened to my mother, my father too albeit with a different woman. It's weird, this thing we call marriage in the US, so wildly consequential to your health, wealth, and happiness and so very very few guardrails to the roads entering it while so very very many trammel your pathway out. The narrator did not have the support of her family going into this marriage, her parents and sister found her husband untrustworthy; now that he's decided to go for his own happiness and she's still in the first house dealing with the consequences, she sees the obstacles and restrictions ahead.

It's a good moment to discuss the astrology underpinning the story. A blocked novelist turned praticing astrologer, the narrator sees how wonderfully astrology assembles a narrative for the failure of her marriage in the first angular house. (Interesting she, a first-generation South Asian immigrant family member, did not choose Vedic astrology to practice. Avoiding racializing yourself in that way has first house implications.) I'll put the Wikipedia précis of the meaning of the first house here: "The angular houses of the horoscope are considered to be the most ardent, or forceful, and are considered to have the greatest impact in the chart. The influential 17th-century astrologer William Lilly states simply: 'Planets in angles do more forcibly show their effects.' Angular houses rule those critical things in our life, such as our appearance and how we behave, our family life, our married life or partnerships, and our career." Our understanding of astrology as readers is best surrendered to Author Doshi, though. Follow her lead.

What resonated with me was our narrator's use of astrology rather than her understanding of it as a practice. As raising children fully eats one's creative force in many, many people, the narrator must find both income and outlet from and for her creativity. Astrology to the rescue. It provides moments of easter-egged humor as we go though the story. On the narrator's quest to put this life-changing shift in her marriage into context, figure out how to be a functional parent and (self-)provider, find her feet with the birth-family who candidly disliked the abandoner from the start and will recolonize her every thought, feeling, and action unless she is truly vigilant, when in this mishegas does she have a minute to grieve her loss?

Never. So the human thing to do is to find a story. Her own springs being low, maybe even goddesses forfend dry, she turns to the myths that underpin astrology and culture more broadly. Have the neighbors always had a statue of Diana in their yard? Diana, huntress, virgin, changeable Diana thirty feet away? There it is though...whenever it got there, it's there...and it's the catalyst for the narrator to examine the fear, the wilful blindness of her (and her older sister's) carefully padded, packed away, crated for storage emotional lives: "What I had believed to be indestructible was gone. The way I had engaged with the world was no longer possible. The children came into the room, already in their pyjamas, and caught me talking to myself. They couldn't understand that I was meeting myself as someone new."

Child of immigrants who carry very different ideas about how to feel with the narrator's new status from her own, still muddled, ones, the narrator has to confront her adult self's precarity by resisting her family's intrusive bullying with enough panache to maintain a thread of connection. In her meeting with herself as a monad, the narrator understands mother's and sister's worlds are her world: compromise, retreat, rock no boats follow no clues to pay for Security. The narrator's bargain was reneged on by the party of the second part. Her female relatives...they have feelings, no reason to look into them like the narrator has, and estrangement makes them unwilling to listen to her.

The great power of betrayal, of destruction, is its undeniability. The ruins are there. The foundations aren't there. The situation of economic and emotional dependence on outsiders, others, is the root of her first-house troubles. In her attempts to find a self while becoming of necessity someone new in practical terms, the narrator channels all her story-stuff...research, reading, thinking...into a scaffolding to hang a new self woven intentionally in full knowledge of where the old version failed first.

There was not one person in this story I liked, would invite to my home for a day's relaxing chat and cooking and just...being. They're all determined to make their forced-from-without changes as hard and as noisily painful as possible. What I felt for them was compassion. What I could not believe was how invested I was in their irritating nonsense. I wanted each of them to figure it out, to get to the floorboards that might creak...gotta make noise...but will hold them up while they learn to support their own internality.

It is why I landed a bit above the baseline four stars this kind of capable, slightly overwound storytelling merits. Author Doshi, I will be delighted to see where you decide to lead me next.