TECH GIANT
A male figurehead looms large at his wife’s start-up in Tahmima Anam’s witty new novel that skewers workplace sexism
Tahmima Anam – whose debut novel, A Golden Age, won a 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize – nearly published her new novel under a pseudonym. The Startup Wife is very different from her first book, and the two novels that followed, The Good Muslim and The Bones of
Grace; in those she delved deeply into the political history of Bangladesh, where she herself was born, so she was afraid readers would be puzzled by her new direction. But the truth is that this fast-paced, warmly engaging tale of 21st-century tech is one of the best and sharpest reads of the summer, and sure to win Anam a whole new set of fans.
It focuses on an American couple, Asha and her husband Cyrus, who dream up a social network called WAI that uses machine-learning to create personalised rituals, offering a sense of individual meaning without all the demands and rules of religion. Asha – the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants – is the brains, the coder behind what becomes a staggeringly successful platform, huge on the scale of Facebook. Cyrus, her white husband, is the spiritual front man, who gets all the glory. Asha’s initial instinct is to push Cyrus to the front: he has the charisma of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk rolled into one. But the platform is built on Asha’s skill, and she is its conscience. It’s a smart story that takes on the tech industry, feminism and cultural differences.
As WAI develops Viking death rituals, Wonder Woman prayer circles and the worship of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anam brings a blistering humour to each element. ‘That’s all I care about now! ’ she says, grinning. ‘I used to care about writing serious literary fiction, now I want to make people laugh. I want to be validated! People are like, “Your book is great.” But I’m thinking, “Yeah, but did it make you laugh? Did you get the jokes?”’
Anam’s background is cosmopolitan; her father worked for Unesco, so she grew up all over the world; she took her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. Her knowledge of the world of tech comes at first hand. We’re chatting in the east-London offices of Roli, the digital-music company founded by her husband, Roland Lamb. Lamb has some of the spiritual side of WAI’s fictional guru, Cyrus: he has a degree in Classical Chinese and Sanskrit Philosophy, and when he and Anam met he was a Zen Buddhist monk. But he went on to design an electronic keyboard, which was the company’s foundation; now its instruments are used by musicians including Ed Sheeran. Anam sits on Roli’s board: she calls this her ‘side-hustle’, but it’s certainly given her an insight to the realities – and baked-in sexism – of the tech world.
Asha, she says, is her ‘fantasy’: ‘What would it have been like if a woman had gone on this journey, instead of my white, male, American husband?’ In her observation of start-up culture, ‘all the clichés are true. There is sexism woven into the language of the workplace. There are all these phrases: “Shall we open the full kimono?” [meaning, to share all information] or “They’re pregnant: they might as well just have the baby”. They say that stuff all the time,’ she says. She realises that, as a novelist, she has for the most part been safely outside that environment. ‘I think that if I had gone on that journey as a woman and a person of colour, I would have experienced it more vividly; there would have been certain doors that were open or not open to me.’
The danger for Asha is that her own creation might cause her to disappear. She produces the architecture of WAI so that Cyrus can climb to the top of the tower. ‘She builds an entire universe, she creates this thing that makes other people worship him. I think that in some form or another, that’s just what women do, right? We sweep the floor so the man can walk through.’ She gives a dry smile. ‘People have asked me whether there’s a feminist drive or some kind of moral urgency to this story, and I’ve said, “That’s pretty much all I want to write about.” It’s the story of a woman who finds her voice.’ Anam’s own voice, in The Startup Wife, comes through loud and clear. ‘The Startup Wife’ by Tahmima Anam (£14.99, Canongate) is out now.