From Gothic novels to indie-rock lyrics, the house is a mirror of the troubled family within it. V.S. Naipaul’s 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas is another one of these broken-home narratives; the Trinidadian novelist presents a surprisingly moving satire of arranged marriage and thwarted ambition.
Mohun Biswas—always referred to by the narrator as “Mr Biswas,” even while he’s still a baby—lives in a makeshift, repurposed, patched and jerry-built world. Every surface is described so we can see how the paint peels and the pillars sway. He marries very young and accidentally, to an equally unprepared girl named Shama. Shama is part of a huge, pushy family who enclose and support the young couple in spite of Mr Biswas’s many rebellions against them. You understand exactly why he hates them, even as you’re noticing how often they bail him out of financial jams without receiving any thanks. Mr Biswas is a fractious, sarcastic soul, and his furious struggle against the ongoing defeat of his life gives the novel its Waughian flavor.
His greatest dream is to have his own house, and from the opening pages of the novel we know that he will succeed—sort of. The novel opens with Mr Biswas’s death, which came swiftly after he secured a house of his own. This house is described in excruciating detail—its doorless doorways, its shadeless heat and perpetually wet bathroom—until you’re just baffled by the extent of the place’s problems. And yet Mr Biswas is so proud of it. The rest of the novel, told in flashback, takes you through his life so that when you at last revisit the house its absurdities will be heartbreaking rather than just appalling.
One of the book’s central phrases is “cat-in-bag.” This is a description Mr Biswas hears from a local Christian convert, which he picks up because it so perfectly describes the catastrophe of his marriage: Only after you’ve bought the bag do you get to look at the cat. Shama lives alongside him rather than with him (and often not even alongside him), and he’s surprised when he learns—late in the novel—that she has opinions. There are tender moments for them, but not many, and Mr Biswas is better at noticing Shama’s hidden interior life than at respecting it.
The house, that godawful final house, is bought cat-in-bag too. Mr Biswas is snookered into it—partly because he won’t let Shama see it. The book’s central emotion is the feeling of having been snookered: waking up inside an unlivable situation, trying to understand how you got here and how you can get out, blaming the people who got you here but realizing that on a deeper level you did it to yourself.
This is what makes the novel so intensely relatable. A House recognizes how frightening and debilitating this feeling can be, the feeling of being thrown into the world, “born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.” There’s an extended sequence in which Mr Biswas and his son live alone in an isolated, half-built house—the predecessor of the final house—which reads more like a horror novel than like a social satire. Melting asphalt hangs down from the ceiling in black snakes, which fall on the floor—and on Mr Biswas—and spawn smaller snakes. This sequence ends with a nervous breakdown from which Mr Biswas won’t recover for a long time. And yet he does recover. He gets up and goes on fighting. He’s constantly thwarted and never quite resigned.
In this way a novel about an arranged marriage on a tiny colonial island can speak to anyone who’s felt unbearable economic pressure, who has felt dreams and ambitions crumbling out from under their feet, or who has woken up inside their marriage feeling like they’re in somebody else’s house. If you can’t relate to this stuff yet… come back to this novel in ten years. Biswas is everyone eventually.
Editor’s note: This post is the final installment of a series of posts on five great novels about marriage.
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