New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Aside from having kind of a witty prose style, Pearson does cast a rather deft light into the world of women in the financial services industry. Women’s liberation has gone a long way, but it still has a huge amount of progress to make in the way of motherhood. As this is rarely spoken about or covered in the press in any kind of substantial way, Pearson’s work is among the first to explore the subject matter. It’s really important that this sort of thing gets addressed if we’re truly to become equal. I Don’t Know How She Does It is a very socially relevant book even now, nearly a decade after it was published. It is this social relevance that has catapulted it to the kind of success that it rightly deserves. That being said, the novel itself is a bit of a harried mess.

The wit and wisdom of the novel could easily be distilled into a book a fraction of the length of I Don’t Know How She Does It. The plot meanders quite a bit - just like real life, I suppose, but there are moments in here that feel larger than life and throw the whole thing out of perspective. Reddy is given an American client - one Jack Abelhammer. He is a charming American businessman who gets compared to George Clooney just enough that one can’t help but imagine him in the role. (And with the prose style being sufficiently Fielding-esque, it’s inevitable that one pictures Renée Zellweger as Reddy.)

Through a brief misdirection of emails, Reddy and Abelhammer become a bit closer than business associates. Reddy has feelings for him that she doesn’t have for her husband. There’s a kind of a chaste affair between the two of them that involves email more than anything. While we don’t get to know Abelhammer OR Reddy’s husband enough to feel that much for either of them, we do get a really striking picture of Reddy, psychological blemishes and all. If there is any impressive quality to this book beyond its social relevance, it lies in a truly compelling picture of a single character in a very complex world.

Apart from the ongoing stresses of motherhood, the conflict in the novel comes in the form of this relationship with Abelhammer and eventually, a couple of plot points with supporting characters that were evidently thrown in at the end in an evident attempt to crystallize the struggle for women between motherhood and the business world. What starts off charmingly enough ends up feeling kind of rushed. Reddy is trying to fake a home-baked pastry for a bake sale at the beginning of the book. Pearson is tying to fake a much more elaborately constructed, artificial plot at the end of the novel. The kind of novel Pearson is going for by the end of the book is one that simply has no business being in a story that sets out to be as naturalistic as it does.

The Movie

The alarming thing about the film version of I Don’t Know How She Does It is how perfectly it conforms to what one would expect. This is a Hollywood film based on a contemporary British novel. The translation is perfect, right down to the Hollywood ending. Sarah Jessica Parker plays the Renée Zellweger role - a pretty close American analog to Zellweger. Parker is only a few years older than her. And whereas Zellweger was very iconic as a woman in first person narration in a British accent as Bridget Jones, Parker was just as iconic in first person narration with an American accent as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex In The City.

American audiences are likely to compare Parker’s Reddy to an older version of Bradshaw, which is not entirely unfair. Parker does a solidly respectable job of distancing this role from that one simply by playing the part without exaggeration. Had she paid more attention to trying to make Reddy less like Bradshaw, it would have come across much more forced than it does here.

Continued:       1       2       3