Grief and Grit: woman faces her crumbling marriage and a brave new world

WHEN THE UNNAMED narrator in Avni Doshi’s latest novel, The First House spots a new statue of Diana—inspired by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture, also known as Diana of the Tower—in her neighbour’s garden, she is transported to her past. She had loved the original and often returned to the museum to see it; on one such visit, she had met the man she would marry. The goddess granted inspiration and ushered her into a life that enabled it—marriage, a new home and a room of her own. It was a time of radical possibilities. “But I had not understood that gift, that improbability of her favour, and I had squandered it.”

This realisation dawns as the narrator finds her marriage reduced to dust just as the mating season of cicadas is about to begin. It is a sudden catastrophe unleashed one April evening as she sits “pretending to work” on her novel while really studying her birth chart. Before he launches into a long-winded definitive takedown of the marriage, he asks if she is too tired to talk. Some pages later, she wonders if the conversation would have ended differently had she just replied yes.

She is indeed exhausted but the additional distress leaves the narrator tattered and exposed. What she had “believed to be indestructible was gone”. Her debut novel Burnt Sugar, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, displayed Doshi’s searing command over words. In The First House she applies her distinct vocabulary with an intensity that draws her protagonist’s inner struggles in sharp relief.

Grieving and embarrassed, the narrator sways between highs and lows. She disregards dressing up and dyeing her hair while her garden wilts into disarray. Her two young daughters navigate their way through the sudden change, often fending for themselves. An acquaintance says she never liked the man; her cousin asks if she sensed the moment she had begun to deceive herself about the state of her marriage; her neighbour offers carrot cake and consolations.

When she falls into a state of irreparable stupor, her father and Didi take her and the girls away. But her parents’ home, where Didi continues to live, is no sanctuary either. A different sense of oppression inhabits here, so acute that she clamours to leave as soon as she can help it: “…I couldn’t bear to dream in my parent’ home.”

The First House neither offer resolutions through the five stages of grief nor does Doshi give any of her characters a clean chit. Everyone is capable of inflicting blows—some soft, some brutal—on others as much as on themselves. The husband’s betrayal is only the brick lying at the top of a collapsed Jenga tower. Buried beneath are other failings and disappointments. Before marriage and motherhood, her parents and Didi—their collective superstitions and individual peculiarities—have already shaped the narrator’s life. Numerous unpleasant episodes with her husband add to this rubble, from his bemusing and repetitive stories to a dodgy stance on household finances. But some of the debris is made entirely of self-loathing— not being able to drive or swim, her misgivings about relationships, and her failures as a writer.

In a story where the narrator’s loss of self feels greater than the dissolution of marriage, the reappearance of Diana (whose story Doshi, an art history graduate, fleshes out in vivid detail) in her life is an act of fortuity. As she discovers, the neighbour’s statue is not a new installation—she simply hadn’t noticed it earlier. The timing of the discovery is aligned with a new phase of possibilities. Grief transforms into the door to a world that is “sharp and full of colour.” To unlock the door, she must remember what it is like to be audacious.