THE STARTUP WIFE

A brilliant coder marries her high school crush and creates an app that accidentally turns him into the millennial messiah.

After high school, Asha Ray blossomed. "I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time....I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder." She's working at a high-powered Cambridge AI lab when she attends the funeral of a high school teacher back on Long Island. There, she runs into the beautiful, long-lost Cyrus, who now creates alternative rituals based on all the spiritual traditions of the Earth. Two months later they are married, and she's left her lab to found a startup with her new husband and his wealthy best friend, Jules. WAI (We Are Infinite), the app Asha writes, leverages Cyrus' alternative-ritual concept into a social media platform. Though the lawyers they consult about incorporation suggest that the couple get a postnup, two years later Asha remains on cloud nine. "I'm going to write a marriage guide," she thinks. "I'll call it The Startup Wife: How To Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time." But as WAI scales the heights of venture capital and turns into an international obsession—users have shared 800,000 cat baptisms alone—with Cyrus as its face, any good feminist might predict a darker outcome for this story. Anam's fourth novel is very good on all the tech and millennial accoutrements, with imaginary apps for everything from consensual sex to anal hygiene and no scene complete without a glass of raspberry shrub or rosemary water. Nits: The outcome is overly signaled; feminism plays an odd role somewhere between liberation ideology and buzzkill; the front end of the pandemic crashing into the back end of the book seems unnecessary.

A clever, often funny anti-romance novel set in the world of platforms, launches, engagements, and turmeric lattes.