The First House
Doshi gives readers a raw, jolting look into how the unnamed narrator comes apart in the months after her husband’s declaration of divorce ... Six years after Burnt Sugar, her Booker Prize-shortlisted debut about a fraught mother-daughter bond, she brings the same instinct for turning ordinary domestic space into something dangerous.
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It would be too glib to suggest that the novel traces a journey from deluge to deliverance, and Doshi is too intelligent a writer to leave us with facile resolutions, but this is a vivid and vigorous novel about the distress of marital collapse and a kind of self-seeking that strives to be restorative ... At her best, though, Doshi captures something that begins at the edges of the narrator’s understanding but which will gradually become more apparent and important: the staunch love of sisters and friends ... Doshi is excellent, too, on the sensitivity of daughters. In the midst of her breakdown, the narrator wakes up 'to the dark, to a daughter on either side, each holding one arm, grasping me for comfort, or perhaps to hold me down, chain me to the bed as though I were a madwoman.' Both are possible in this disquieting novel about the strange textures of female consciousness under pressure.
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The woman’s fidelity to astrology is one of her only consistent traits. The rest of her — the firmament of who she is — is a frustrating cipher. It has become modish to write about characters whose names and histories are kept from us, who are used to reveal truths about life around them. But this approach to fiction works best when such characters appear in chiaroscuro; when, for everything we don’t see, there are equal swaths of brilliance and clarity ... On the basis of her earlier novel, Doshi is a talented writer. But here, her skill is overtaken by a gravitational collapse.
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