THE STARTUP WIFE
By Tahmima Anam
EDGE CASE
By Y. Z. Chin
Start-ups: We know they’re bad for politics, culture, workers, restaurants, sex, dating, fashion, San Francisco, Seattle, Berlin, local languages other than English, English, and people who enjoyed life more before teenagers could rent electric scooters. Two new novels suggest another downside: They’re also bad for marriage.
Like a C.E.O. trying to disrupt something — anything! — Tahmima Anam’s “The Startup Wife” imagines straying from the path laid by its title. A woman goes into business with her husband, does the grunt work, feels sidelined and is finally vindicated when something goes terribly wrong that her pragmatic advice would have prevented, if only the men had listened to her. “Sometimes being right is actually worse than being wrong,” she says. The marriage won’t work out, either.
Asha Ray is a graduate student at M.I.T. who has been developing “an algorithm designed to unlock the empathetic brain for artificial intelligence.” The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants who became entrepreneurs the slow, old-fashioned way (owning a small chain of pharmacies called “Health Beats” in Queens), Asha is frustrated by both her fearsome academic adviser and the fact that her dream of building robots to “just be better versions of us” is very hard to realize. When she re-encounters her high school crush, Cyrus Jones, at their English teacher’s funeral, she is still enthralled, and eager to show him the better version of herself. Since dropping out of school after his mother died, Cyrus has cultivated a reputation for a defiant yet sensitive genius, making a living “conducting baptisms and cremations and writing little prayers for people to say at the bedside of a sick relative.” He fancies himself a (devastatingly hot) free spirit, helping people “find … meaning without the baggage of religion.” The pair elope immediately.
Soon they devise a new social media platform: “We Are Infinite,” or WAI, pronounced “why” and amenable to puns with “wise.” A few years ago I was eavesdropping on a conversation at a now-defunct women’s co-working space, and I learned the term for this kind of business arrangement: “partner partners!” Imagine it exclaimed with the same doomed excitement as the title of this novel. Asha adjusts her empathy algorithm so that it can customize nonreligious rituals for users, who can then form communities around “what gives their life meaning, instead of what they like or don’t like.” Their friend Jules provides comic relief and parents who, despite their WASP-y cruelty, pay for everything, until the couple find their funding.
And find it they do. The trio is accepted into a “secretive,” ultraexclusive start-up incubator called Utopia, focusing on projects that will help humanity survive the apocalypse; they’ve been looking for an app to “help people frame their existence” in the “post-world world.” Asha drops out of her Ph.D. program and WAI becomes wildly popular, its founders wildly wealthy.
What’s surprising is not the plot itself, but its wholesomeness — despite all the novel’s trappings of tech skepticism, from understated sendups of silly naming conventions, to an office that requires guests to hop across a trampoline to enter, to a moral lesson about the harmful effects of megalomaniacal scale. Except for the venture capitalists (“If you’re not an assassin, you can’t do your job”), everyone in this novel has good intentions. Asha offers little analysis of the topic about which she is supposedly an underappreciated expert, and as a result the book demonstrates an overall acceptance of the tech industry and its machinations, suggesting its problems can be solved merely by giving women a seat at the table.
Even as the idealist tenets of WAI’s manifesto — no trying to persuade people to buy things, no spying, the team is paramount — crumble, the earnestness with which Anam approaches her characters papers over the selfishness, cynicism and myopia that pervade their insular world. And the heavy foreshadowing suggests a much bigger marital breakdown than the Paltrowian conscious uncoupling we get instead. Although Asha is supposed to be the talented foil to a man who thinks he can get by on good will and charisma, she never keeps the novel itself from trying to do just that.
Y. Z. Chin’s debut novel, “Edge Case,” takes up many of the same themes — love, marriage, tech, race, immigration, parents, death — but instead of user engagement, Chin focuses on engagement with actual problems. The narrator, Edwina, is not a founder, but a lowly “quality assurance analyst” at a company called AInstein, tasked with catching bugs in code before customers do. “The men regularly referred to me in the office as ‘the tester,’” she says. “It always made me think of the sad labeled tubes of lipstick at Sephora, mauve heads battered and ready to transmit oral herpes.”
Pragmatic and droll (a former English major, naturally), she’s under no illusions about the ability of her company to change the world; despite her initial excitement about AInstein’s product — “A robot that could intelligently tell jokes! A selfless companion that would lift spirits, albeit in the form of a crude metal head attached to a (so far) immobile body” — her interest in her job is entirely bureaucratic. She and her husband, Marlin, don’t work together, but they, too, are bound by more than just love: Both are immigrants from Malaysia on H-1B visas who have lived and worked at start-ups in the United States for several years, and their relationship is entangled with the forms they are constantly having to send to the imposing immigration office.
It’s distressing enough that the deadline is approaching for them to apply for green cards, if their respective employers agree to sponsor them. But the novel begins with an even bigger problem: Following the death of his father, Marlin has become moody, isolated and obsessed with a practice called dowsing, which he thinks will help him “contact spirit guides and advisers” who can shepherd him through life’s hard decisions. (As these two novels make clear, the death of a parent is an acceptable reason to become aggressively spiritual.) One day Edwina arrives home to find he has vacated their shared studio apartment and is not responding to her messages.
The novel follows Edwina’s search for Marlin and her accompanying minor breakdown — a longtime vegetarian, she starts eating all the meat she can find, from Chicken McNuggets to an $18 prime rib sandwich. Interwoven through this story are flashbacks to sweet moments from their relationship and disorienting episodes from Edwina’s struggle to adjust to life in America. Chin’s specificity and wonderfully drawn minor characters add depth and richness to a story that another writer might have washed out with the glaring light of moral clarity. Edwina’s obnoxious co-worker is a believably ridiculous tech bro, flirtatiously accusing her of having crushes on the other men in the office, and demanding she read his novel in progress, “a combination of all the best-selling genres: sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance.” Her mother, back in Malaysia, appears frequently in a box in the corner of Edwina’s laptop, her fuzzy Skype calls a platform for dispensing advice and “spinning past life stories” about Edwina, often insulting ones. Her mother provides the kind of structure Edwina doesn’t necessarily want, but needs.
What emerges is not only a subtly provocative depiction of the tech industry, and this country, as tilting ever more off-kilter; but also a realistic portrayal of a woman in crisis. Edwina’s problems are of the kind that can’t be solved through faulty logic or convenient substitution, but of course we humans, not yet the best versions of ourselves, will try the faulty logic and convenient substitution anyway. If “The Startup Wife” takes for granted that 21st-century individuals are desperate for meaning and ritual, “Edge Case” shows us why, even as it also shows how our quick fixes, whether they be gimmicky apps or “riots of New Age stuff hybridized willy-nilly with scientific and engineering terms,” will inevitably fall short.
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