THE STARTUP WIFE. By Tahmima Anam. Simon & Schuster. 304 pages. $26.
Can we blame tech superstars like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos for what happens on their platforms? What happens when a great idea takes on a life of its own? These are questions at the heart of Tahmima Anam’s latest novel, “The Startup Wife.”
The stars seem to align for protagonist Asha Ray. She’s smart, grown out of her awkward phase, and driven to lofty ambitions. Her Ph.D. project involves artificial intelligence that she believes will make robots more human with empathy, but when her work butts up against the limits of neurological science, she finds another outlet for her code.
Her world-changing idea comes shortly after reuniting with her high school crush. In a whirlwind romance, Asha marries Cyrus, a charismatic, spiritual (in the unaffiliated sense), free-thinker two months after meeting him again as an adult. He uses his breadth of cultural and world religion knowledge to create rituals for people, like weddings and funerals, based on their interests. And bums off his wealthy friend Jules for a roof over his head and food in his stomach. He’s hot and wise, like Brad Pitt after seven years in Tibet, and seemingly after one night of passion, Asha knows how to change the world.
“In the morning I casually suggested to Cyrus that we should start a platform that allowed people without religion to practice a form of faith. I said I would customize the Empathy Module algorithm to create rituals around the things that people loved: their hobbies, their obsessions, their favorite characters in their favorite books. It would pull from history, from novels, from poetry and witchcraft.
People could form micro-communities around their interests, and in this age of emptiness, it would give them a kind of virtual parish.
“ ‘You can do that?’
“ ‘I have magic hands.’ I giggled. ‘Just like you.’ ”
Cyrus resists the idea at first because social media and making money aren’t his idea of cool. But after Asha and Jules (who becomes the third partner) get invited to join an exclusive, famous tech incubator, Cyrus relents. And here the plot begins to thicken.
The incubator may be named Utopia, but the underlying mission is preparing for the apocalypse. They are funded by tech companies, high net-worth individuals and government pension funds — 1 percenters who can afford to survive. Other companies headquartered within the gleaming, sleek tower are an internet obituary service, an app that functions as a contract of consent to be used before intimate encounters and engineered food producers.
The tower itself functions off the grid, ready to secure and support them all in the end times, an ark in the middle of the city. They are eager to bring in Asha’s invention because religion and ritual play such a powerful role in humanity, and people might need it when the world falls apart.
From there, Asha, Cyrus and Jules are sucked into the high-pressure startup world, where their invention grows to need a team and takes on investors who want a say in the direction. As the stakes get higher, Asha, despite her own outsized ego, relinquishes control, sequestering herself with her team of developers while greed and power cloud the decisions her husband and business partners make.
Then, of course, the unthinkable happens, in more ways than one.
“The Startup Wife” is an interesting departure for Anam, whose three other novels are a multigenerational family saga about Muslim life in Bangladesh, Pakistan and the United States. Religion is a theme she’s worked with before. Though the book is best when the characters banter over vegan, nut-free, gluten-free coffee hemp mylkshakes with extra CBD shots about how they’re going to make the post-apocalypse a better place.
Definitely lighter in tone than her other books, “The Startup Wife” is good. Anam writes with a delightful wryness about young people today, startup culture and the onset of the end of the world. It would have been better if readers could see some of the big developments happen on page, like Asha working to connect the dots of her idea, rather than learning about it as a fully formed casual suggestion.
The story feels at times to rely too heavily on summary. Dramatic moments seem skimmed over instead of mined; tension released instead of built. But, overall, “The Startup Wife” is a fun, intelligent contemporary novel about timely ethical questions.
In the end, there’s a shakeup at Utopia. Millionaires lose their board positions, projects get scrapped and the marriage suffers. But readers may be left wondering if the inventors were ever really held accountable for the damage that happened on their watch, if the ones in the fancy tower ever really hit bottom, which is perhaps a part of the book that rings most true to real life.
Reviewer Melinda Copp is a Bluffton-based freelance writer.
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