Having read Tahmina Anam’s previous three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, Bones of Grace, sometimes known as the Bengal Trilogy), I was surprised (but not unpleasantly) by this one. Anam’s work in the past had been characterised by its focus on Bangladeshis and intense issues such as conflict, religious fundamentalism, gender and other oppressions. They had been intense and serious-minded, taking on board also the diasporic Bangladeshis as well as those in Bangladesh. By contrast, The Startup Wife just escapes being chick-lit by its unsentimentality and lack of frivolity; but it is nevertheless more of a feel-good novel, than socio-political commentary.
Asha Ray is the Bengali-American protagonist, with a fairly ordinary background of first-generation immigrant parents who worked hard to give their children opportunities; Asha herself is something of a ‘Brain’, at any rate, she considers herself a geek, and is a coding expert. In high school, she had a crush on a boy named Cyrus, and meeting him again as adults, this swiftly and almost instantly transforms into a love and romance, which is reciprocated. This novel is thankfully not a rom-com type, starting as it does with a happy romance, rather than chasing a romance which only comes good at the end. In fact, for most of the novel, Asha and Cyrus are happily married.
These two characters are interesting, but the other ones are mere sidekicks and two-dimensional – Jules, Cyrus’ rich, gay friend, Gaby, Jules’ boyfriend, Desire, the token black woman who is stereotypically fearless and feisty, Li Ann the sleek, impressive, efficient but still human head of innovation at Utopia, etc etc. These sidekicks are just rolled out to speak their supporting roles and little else. Asha and Cyrus are non-stereotypical, but they seem the only ones.
Asha is doing her PhD when she meets Cyrus and has an idea for software based on Cyrus’ knowledge of religions, and their identification of a gap in the market in the form of demand for secular religious rituals.
[…] I could code an algorithm that would allow people to get a kind of Cyrus ritual, you know, a combination of all their things wrapped up in a little modern package, without the sexism, homophobia, and burning in the fires of hell of actual religion.
p46
The notion of basing an AI platform on Cyrus is because
Cyrus was consistently, encyclopaedically brilliant. He made connections that no other person could ever make, between texts – religious [sic] tradition, history, fiction – and the world – movies, pop songs, memes. […] feeding off Cyrus’ big brain, his appetite for just about everything, and how it seemed to be making its way into zeros and ones, all with the little tap-tap-tapping of my fingers.
p49
The story follows the usual dotcom or app-creation route to success by Utopia giving Asha, Cyrus and Jules an incubation opportunity for them to launch their project and start up. They go from success to success, a tight-knit group of friends, all apparently super-talented in their different ways, working crazy hours and loving it all. Anam gives a charming, if somewhat typecast depiction of these young, driven people who start with nothing and yet do not feel deprived, devoted as they are to their work, but then who rapidly are shot into success and wealth by their innovative product swiftly go on to lead a yuppified, dream lifestyle:
Cyrus and I live like wolves, but when we are at the office, it doesn’t matter; in fact, Cyrus’ desk is always spotless , and my code, I know, is uncluttered and elegant. Nothing like my bedside table, which is not a bedside table at all but a crate I once picked up on the side walk and on which I precariously balance a number of items […] All this is about to change. Cyrus and I are closing on an apartment in the Lower East Side. It contains an abundance of glass and steel […] two floors, multiple bathrooms, and a six-burner stove. We are going to cook meals, make our beds, and take dour coffee cups to the sink. We are going to purchase furniture and flower vases. We are going to return the mugs we stole from the diner. I have visions of dinner parties, people laughing, their delighted faces reflected in our excellent choice of cutlery.
p193
The problems start to arise when there are disagreements amongst the board members, usually with Cyrus, who is spoilt and entitled but seemingly held in awe by everyone, insisting on impractical modes of working simply to fit in with his own set of values and principles. At first, and for a long time, Asha is so in love she does not mind yielding control to Cyrus, and even seems to enjoy pandering to his demands and whims and effacing her own concerns and preferences. She is self-aware enough to know Cyrus is not behaving well by her, but also that she has enabled and maybe even created this situation/set-up:
In the meantime, he is also my husband. And he is also my boss. How have I managed to make it all so complicated, and how have I managed to put myself on the margins of this story?
p208
Oddly enough, Anam does make any reference to the Asian identity and patriarchal culture Asha Ray comes from; the story is framed as if Asha does all this simply because she is Asha, a girl in love, rather than because of any cultural conditioning or subconscious bias. While it is important not to be reductionist or play to immigrant-stereotypes, it seems a little unrealistic that Asha is seemingly so untouched by gender norms, of Bengali culture, or socially imbibed values sets and expectations.
However, there are flashes of much better social analysis occasionally in the novel, such as when Asha reflects on her parents feeling caught in-between worlds, as so many successful first-generation immigrants are:
[…] my parents existed in a half-way world between Long Island and Bangladesh, too comfortable to go home, never comfortable enough to stop longing for it.
p21
The pace of the novel is good, and the writing is often amusing and good at giving thumb-nail sketches of situations and people for that sense of instant recognition. This novel however, comes across as Anam-lite; in fact, I may not even have recognised this as a Tahmina Anam novel were her name not on the cover, so much has it departed from the personality and focus of her first three novels. This one is a much lighter read, much more predictable too, and in much better-known, well-trodden territory. In fact, when asked about this in the Hindustan Times, “The Startup Wife is a departure from your earlier hard-hitting historical fictions. What changed?”, Anam explains:
“I’ve been on the board of my husband’s startup for the last 10 years, and I’ve always felt that the tech world with its lofty promises and confidence, was ripe for satire. I also wanted to write the story of a woman who beats the odds to create one of the world’s most successful companies.
I’ve always been interested in women finding their voices, inhabiting their power, and taking charge of their lives, and this is a thread that runs through all my novels. One can address hard-hitting themes of power, inequality, and gender imbalance with a lighter touch – it doesn’t take anything away from the moral urgency of the story. You just get to laugh a little along the way, which, given the times we’re living through, can’t be a bad thing.”
Hindustan Times interview
The interviewer at Hindustan Times seemed as surprised as any of Anam’s readers might be, given they return again and again to asking about this change in focus, in several different ways:
“Your Bengal trilogy had greatly benefitted from years of work – at Harvard and also combing through your history back in Bangladesh. How did you prepare to write this book?”
“Having lived across the world now, do you think it’s time to bid adieu to Bangladesh or are writers forever trapped within the vectors of who they once were and where they belonged?”
“You’ve said before that writing is a political act. Do you think that as a household name in Bangladeshi literature, you are now duty-bound to comment on socio-political upheavals in the country and educate audiences there on more pressing problems like climate change etc? In other words, could you afford to be someone who just tells stories?”
Anam responds to these questions, but her responses seem rather oblique and do not quite address the thrust of the questions:
“I will always write novels set in Bangladesh. It has, and will always be, my intellectual and spiritual home. But it’s important to bring one’s whole self to an artistic life, and that’s what I’ve done here – I’ve drawn from my childhood in Queens, from my experiences as an immigrant, and my time working in tech.” “I do not want to be someone who just tells stories. I’m a card-carrying feminist, for one thing – and there are many other issues on which I will always have strong opinions. I don’t see this is something that gets in the way of being a novelist – I embrace the fact that I have a moral purpose whenever I sit down to write.”
In the end, of course, an artist should be free to take on whatever topic they wish, regardless of what they have been known for previously. And as long as they produce good work, that surely is what should matter. The Start Up Wife has not the heft and gravitas of some of Anam’s earlier novels, but it is also eminently more readable and better constructed. It would be wonderful if Anam could, in future publications, marry the readability of this latest novel to the weightier issues of her earlier novels. She is definitely an author to keep an eye out for, as she has both writing ability and interesting things to say.
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