The all-too-female cluelessness of "I Don't Know How She Does It"

It never occurs to either one of them that if they are stretched too far as a working couple, Richard's the one who ought to quit working outside the home to be a full-time parent or scale down his hours. After all, despite all her guilt about "neglecting" them, Kate admits that after a weekend with her kids, "I'm screaming to be let out the house, but with Paula it's steady as she goes. Never raises her voice."

Still, Kate and Richard let Paula go and move to Derbyshire, where for some months Kate is a stay-at-home mom. Her house is still a mess and there's no sign that she is having much more fun or more time for herself than she did in London. At the end of the book, she admits to being bored, and it looks as though she'll go back to work again, somehow. She contemplates rescuing a struggling company, though how this will make for more family-compatible hours is anyone's guess.

"I Don't Know How She Does It" is a confused book, not just a book about a confused woman, and this is what makes it a sign of the times. Kate Reddy's problems are all solvable by money, which is why they're not really very interesting. (Compare, say, Kurt Andersen's "Turn of the Century" or Bruce Wagner's "I'm Losing You," business novels that treat money and wealth forthrightly and that raise more thought-provoking questions.) Pearson won't be honest about this, because then her slim pretext of a plot would dissolve utterly.

It's no coincidence that Pearson's confusion centers on money. Because we're no longer sure just what "femininity" and "masculinity" are, money has come to bear a disproportionate symbolic weight. If we're feeling particularly muddled about gender, we tend to fall back on money as a way to sort it out; when in doubt, daddy works and mommy stays at home.

And because having children has become a deliberate choice, rather than an inevitability for almost all heterosexual couples, the decision has to be recast as one of almost existential altruism. It has to mean everything. As Kate puts it: "Children are the proof we've been here ... They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else." Nothing else? Really? Jane Austen's name lives on to prove that she was "here," even though she had no children; Lloyd's of London survives, but who knows whether Lloyd's descendants do?

Pearson won't even give us any characters who choose not to have kids, because if you take away the rationale that women must do most of the childcare, she wouldn't be left with any reason for women not to pursue conventional success. There are plenty of good arguments to be made against people spending their lives chasing money, or working in tense corporate jobs, but Pearson doesn't make them. We're just supposed to think that women are innately better than all that. And they're better because they can be moms.

It's hard to disentangle Pearson's dishonesty about the real issues of work and family life from her own choice to write a clone of another, better book, "Bridget Jones's Diary." While a fair amount of commercial calculation probably went into writing "Bridget Jones," Helen Fielding created vivid characters that readers cared about. Everyone in "I Don't Know How She Does It" besides Kate Reddy is a ghost or a one-liner. Bridget had the idiosyncrasies of the work of the human hand and heart, but this imitation has the feel of a product designed by committee. It's like one of those potato chips manufactured to look homemade.

Pearson, laughing all the way to the bank, might have given a thought to the implicit politics of her work and how most of the joke is on young, confused women who will take her book as yet another bit of "proof" that their place is not the workplace or the executive suite, and that capitalism is designed to keep women down. It's not. History suggests that financial success is the only way women will finally achieve not just legal equality with men but also power and respect. Female managing directors at Lehman make lots more money -- and more honestly -- than Pearson will from this exercise in victimology. And young women would be better off reading Fortune instead.

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