India, Oct. 10 -- A divorce can reinforce all kinds of emotional faultlines. The end of a marriage, or any meaningful relationship, can lay bare all the wounds that came before: via parents, siblings, the inner child. Avni Doshi's new novel, The First House, is an autopsy of a marriage that has fallen apart, and therefore also an autopsy of the self. The unnamed narrator is unnervingly familiar: a millennial wife, mother of two, a writer who is not really writing, financially dependent, deeply self-aware and therefore overwhelmed by helplessness, and feeling everything too viscerally. The novel opens with the protagonist's husband telling her their marriage of 13 years is over. She reaches for her neck and finds that "my neck is missing. My husband has cut it off surreptitiously." She feels the air in their bedroom thin "as he fills it with justifications." She cannot understand why he cannot understand that she cannot breathe, why he looks startled "as though he isn't holding it right there, my head in his hands." Doshi is an art historian. This is her second novel. Her debut, Girl in White Cotton (published overseas as Burnt Sugar) was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. That stunning work was an interrogation of the mother-daughter relationship. "I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure," its narrator had opened with, before going on to unpack that feeling of love and loathing. The First House flows in a similar vein. Doshi lays bare her narrator's convoluted mental state as she makes sense of what has happened, while dissociating from it. Here too she articulates things that aren't usually talked about directly. These themes are far tamer than those of Girl in White Cotton: money, the ickiness of financial asymmetry in millennial marriages, in families and vis-a-vis creative work. The novel is set in suburban America, but it could be anywhere; and although perhaps it could be anyone, any family, or any immigrant family or Indian-American family, here it is a Jain family and Doshi is able to capture the very specific complexity and rigidity of some ideas of "non-violence". Trying to come to terms with the end of her marriage, the narrator discloses the things that were wrong with it. Slowly, with embarrassment, she reveals the things she had chosen to not see because acknowledging them would make them real; things that she still doesn't want to make sense of. How he deleted all his texts and kept an empty inbox, and how, when she asked about that, he had said that is what tech moguls do; that he had saved, after all, all the texts from her. How she was never certain if her credit card would work, and how she had devised ways to work around the embarrassment of that. How she had stopped writing altogether and instead spent her time poring over their astrological charts; a fact that she kept from him. Her shame over the selfishness that writing demands, and the double shame of "choosing" to be less selfish when it wasn't really a choice: She has two girls to raise, a house to manage, a bad marriage, and writing is, after all, an impossible task. Then come the other demons. Her parents and her sister "congratulated themselves for having rescued me from him, but they were the pit of vipers I'd been trying to escape all along." She notes how often her mother has begun to visit her, "not only to see her grandchildren, but to bring back stories like discarded bones, my sister waiting to gnaw at them." How her family could "sit together happily with my fragments, like other families worked on jigsaw puzzles." There is a lot to unpack here, but every time Doshi reveals a fresh layer, she relies a little too heavily on the beauty of her writing and on symbolism. Some of the sentences, bewitching by themselves, feel a bit bewildering in their contexts. Take: "I knew that to love each other we would all have to be monsters." The sentiment is understandable, love being a bit of a monstrous thing, but in this context, in this family, among these people, the idea is left unsubstantiated. At some point, the narrator, in her disorientation, feels unreliable. The reader wishes Doshi had leaned into that aspect more; the feverishness is quite stylistic. Her desperate gambits, such as her obsession with astrology and internet witchcraft, land as millennial tropes. In the background run two motifs symbolising transformation, duality and death, but the obsessions with cicadas and with a statue of the Roman goddess Diana are not explored very deeply. Readers will probably talk about The First House for a long time. It will come up in conversations about divorce, Indian families, writing, money, and learned helplessness. It is so real, it almost feels like a memoir. As a novel, it isn't as satisfying as it could have been....