In the manner of Bridget Jones, Kate Reddy came into being via a news-paper column detailing her quotidian comings and goings. Unlike Jones, Reddy is a "smug married" - only times are much harder for her than that would suggest. She is an investment banker, her husband an architect. They have two small children whom Kate never gets to see.
It's a man's, man's, man's world, is the gist. Reddy is caught in constant flux between guilt at neglecting her children and the desperate urgency of making another hundred grand before - well, why exactly she needs all this cash is opaque, but she needs it right now, OK, and if she were a bloke, then everything would be different.
Line by line, this is the best-written work of its kind since Bridget Jones. The register is jaunty and unforced, and there are occasions of real wit. Kate lacks self-parody, which allows for some unexpected, deftly handled and moving tragedy - one tersely rendered bereavement is tear-jerking beyond the telling of it. If our narrator lets us down, it is when she turns her gift of infinite pity on herself.
But there is also quite a bit missing from this novel - most obviously, any sense of character beyond that of Kate herself. Richard, the husband, is simply watery and long-suffering: it's the kind of spousal portrait that, if a husband gave it of a wife, would be called misogyny. The children don't seem to have any function beyond providing the guilt trip. Many of the supporting characters are idly drawn; in-laws and other parents pop up just to be improbably rude. A black taxi-driver who defies middle-class expectation by studying philosophy nevertheless can barely insert a verb into a sentence ("Last time I looked, running people over still against the law," says the Cicero expert). An alumna of Cheltenham Ladies' College doesn't know who Chaucer is. Kate's two best friends have radically different lives and priorities, yet write spookily identical e-mails. These are minor points, but they could have been avoided had any character bar Kate come alive inside the author's head.
But most problematic is the notion at the axis of the book: that this woman absolutely must earn a huge salary - and if her home life suffers as a result, that makes her the underdog. It's impossible to take someone seriously as a member of the oppressed when the kind of thing they are fighting for is a Kelly Bronze turkey (whatever that is), or swanky Christmas lights, or nice holidays. It's like reading the memoir of someone who tied one leg to the other, then described in intricate, real-time detail the difficulties attendant on hopping everywhere. All you can think is: Untie them, then, you idiot! She has an answer for us: "There are plenty of people who will tell you money doesn't matter: these are the people we call the middle classes." Frankly, she could call us all Eric and it wouldn't make us wrong.
She then has the gall to dress up this craven acquisitiveness as "feminism", to the point where, by the end of the novel, she is likening herself explicitly to the suffragettes. This is all moonshine. Feminism is about parity of opportunity between the sexes. It is not about legislating for women to have guilt-free relationships with their children, regardless of when and how they choose to see them, and what place they take on the Lady to-do list. Can't live with them, can't live without them? Don't have them! Oh, there's an answer to that as well: talking to a young banker, Kate opines that the youngster must spawn offspring, on account of all the "gruesome morons who are reproducing out there".
Anyway, it all ends happily when Kate realises that the family can survive on the salary of one professional after all. The underdog moves to a basket in the country. God bless Emmeline Pankhurst.
Zoe Williams writes for the Guardian
