Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a computer scientist, Asha Ray, the narrator of The Startup Wife, her charismatic husband Cyrus and best friend Jules are nervously pitching their app platform — Asha’s cutting-edge algorithm aimed at people yearning for ritual without religion. Drawing on dreams, obsessions and secret desires — an Odyssey wedding, Game of Thrones funeral, pharaonic celebration — the app will create micro-communities of users; a virtual parish.
Their startup gets the crucial nod, and they join the cool, shiny Utopians who are pursuing projects to support humanity ‘when there’s nothing left’. ‘You’re planning for the apocalypse?’ Jules asks. On the office roof they’re growing vegetables, with self-generated electricity instead of soil, ‘for when the bee population collapses’. Other cheerful prospects include mass antibiotic resistance, climate collapse, world war — and a deadly pandemic, but nobody’s paying attention to that. And not everyone is catastrophising: instant orgasms at board meetings for busy women? There’s a startup for that.
Like her narrator, Tahmima Anam is Bangladeshi, educated at Harvard. Her prize-winning Bengali trilogy led three generations of a family through dark times of war and loss. The Startup Wife is blessedly comic; a satire on the madness of tech tyranny, underpinned by a bitter-sweet feminist love story.
The app is an instant sensation, the trio worth theoretical millions. But Asha has a deepening sense of dread: of something going disastrously wrong. And why is she sweating at her desk, marginalised, while her husband is hailed as an online messiah? Swept into the stratospheric excesses of high-tech, they think they’re living the dream. IRL they are in hell: the brave new virtual world.
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