Cover image of The First House.

We open in a couple’s bedroom. Our unnamed protagonist is told by her husband of thirteen years that their marriage is at an end. She reaches for her neck; “I tell him to stop, stop talking,” she says. “Can’t he see that I can no longer breathe?”

The First House is Avni Doshi’s second novel, following her Booker-shortlisted debut, Burnt Sugar. It marks a deepening of the author’s chief literary concerns — the mechanics of grief and the long unravelling of intimate relationships. Yet this novel wanes before the careful lustre of the first — bloated in spite of its lean volume and curiously opaque despite the depths to which it plunges the reader into the roiling subconscious of its protagonist.

In the wake of her husband’s sudden disappearance, she unravels at an alarming rate: falling into recursive trains of thought and struggling for answers amid the debris of her marital life. Doshi renders with great care the particular financial and emotional dependency within elite, savarna marriages as well as the horror that unfolds upon the crumbling of this edifice. On the other hand, she saturates the novel with heavy-handed metaphors. Her character has very literal dreams: in one of them, her husband abandons her in the middle of a driving lesson, leaving her alone at a traffic light, and unable to find the pedals under her feet.

To South Asian readers, there is little novelty to the author’s insights on the comforts of marriage and the justifications couples make to remain in one. It is less clear why the loss of a dysfunctional marriage tears our protagonist asunder in the manner that it does. The novel seldom carries us into the broader social world beyond its protagonist’s unreliable line of sight, nor illuminates the recesses of her husband’s mind. Far from the acuity with which Burnt Sugar traced the particular elite milieu of Pune, The First House, set in nondescript American suburbia, feels saturated with occlusions. Yes, grief can sometimes sound solipsistic and take detail for granted, but those are traits we overlook in the grief of the ones we love; the novel is hasty in demanding the same from its readers.

The unvarnished contortions of our protagonist’s grieving mind don’t always land with intentional heft — relationships in fiction between the reader and character need time, context and variation, all three of which are titrated closely across the novel. Doshi’s staccato, minimal prose, flensed of the specificity of time and setting, meanders and eddies around repetitive themes. Its dialogue is turgid, and the pitched quarrels between husband and wife are a tough read: Men were supposed to be simple, she says, how was it that he was so complicated? “You can’t speak without insulting me,” he shoots back. “This is who you are, just like I said.” My throat was closing, she says to the reader. Why was he trying to torture me?

Here is a novel that asks too much of its readers and drives an unequal bargain. Some books make you wish to escape back into the real world.

The First House

By Avni Doshi

Penguin

pp. 224; Rs 599