RIDING HIGH IN APRIL

A tech entrepreneur struggles to launch his startup and hold together a tattered relationship with his girlfriend in this novel.

Stuart is a talented software engineer who develops a secure system, COMPASS, that helps clients safely connect to a “distributed cloud infrastructure.” This is an especially unconventional project since it is based on “open software,” the “rebel cult” to which he’s religiously devoted. His work takes him away from San Francisco and his girlfriend, Marie, with whom he suffers a hobbled relationship. He’s singularly obsessed with his career, and she’s equally attached to the prospect of having a child with him, though he seems completely disinterested in fatherhood, a divide sensitively limned by Townsend. Marie misses Stuart in his absence, and suddenly, without announcement, she flies to Seoul to see him, a visit he receives with ambivalent feelings. They move to Singapore together and travel all over Asia, but she’s unhappy—they’re not married, and she has neither a career nor a child to demand her devotion. But since Stuart fails to properly explain his product to prospective clients and at heart Marie is an author, he asks her to ghostwrite a book for him, a task that keeps her busy and at least nominally connected to his preoccupations. Townsend vividly depicts the singular cultural ethos of the tech world—that peculiar combination of microscopically diligent engineering and dreamy aspiration—and deftly dissects its global variations: Much of the tale takes place in Asia. But the tensions that beset Stuart and Marie, while delicately unfurled, are familiar, if not formulaic. In addition, the author draws readers deeply into the technical bowels of Stuart’s work with discussions that are terminologically prohibitive to the uninitiated and likely tedious. There are far too many lines like this one, which is spoken by Stuart: “They might have predictive analytics solutions, but the combination of the core COMPASS platform and the network data we’ve amassed through our MNS offering, together with the machine learning algorithms, will allow us to identify specific patterns and enable us to differentiate our services and emerge front and center in the growing cybersecurity space.”

An intriguing but overly technical tale of frustrated love and ambition.