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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Money isn't one of the items Kate mentions in her litany of what she loves about her job: "I love the blood rush when the stocks I took a punt on deliver the goods. I get a kick out of being one of the handful of women in the Club Lounge at the airport ... Most of all I love the work: the synapse-snapping satisfaction of being good at it, of being in control when the rest of life seems such an awful mess." You'd never guess that Kate is in a field that most people would say they stick with for the money, even for the sense of achievement they get from earning so much: "It's a way of keeping score" is the Wall Street cliché.
What Pearson is describing is life in a much less demanding job -- as a moderately successful newspaper columnist (Pearson's job), say -- one that pays a lot less money than her heroine is supposedly earning. And Kate is the kind of woman who wouldn't be likely to go to work in the City to begin with. Kate calmly accepts her boss's decision not to give her a bonus. In investment banking, that's a signal to switch firms -- but she doesn't have the authentic attitude, the pride or the swagger. While Pearson accurately notes investment bankers' class bias, she doesn't get at their self-identification as an aristocracy. When I used the term "former investment banker" to one of my bosses in corporate finance 20 years ago, it was as if I'd said, "a former duke." He snapped, "There are no former investment bankers."
In other words, Pearson has created a money manager who hardly cares about money and doesn't know how to use the money she has. Kate's life reflects those of many working women, but not those of hedge-fund managers. So why didn't Pearson just make Kate a middle manager? It wouldn't suit her ideological point, which seems to be that even the heights of worldly success aren't worth the sacrifices for a working mother. (This message also makes all the middle managers who don't seem likely to scale those heights feel better.)
Pearson doesn't want her heroine to like money because nice girls don't -- and because people socialized in publishing, like Pearson, are especially likely not to. But to make her points about family, Pearson stacks the deck. Kate endures the kind of domestic chaos her real-life counterparts don't have to -- and don't -- abide, and she doesn't enjoy the rewards of her career.
And when Richard briefly moves out (who wouldn't, with the filth and the rats and lice and the demanding nanny and the bitchy wife?), what brings him back is Kate's giving up her job. Doesn't make much sense -- God help an architect whose stay-at-home wife has a shoe habit -- but Pearson isn't trying to write a book about how such dilemmas are resolved. She's trying to convince us that women have a rough lot, no matter what they choose.
Kate is also given a singularly nasty bunch of male colleagues. There's a subplot involving Internet pornography and one particularly demonic banker, but even the one who seems to have a heart -- posh, gruffly kind Robin Cooper-Clark -- remarries six months after his wife dies of cancer. Sexist comments abound in a way completely untrue to the memories of my own investment banking days 20 years ago.
It could be objected that Pearson is criticizing the type of men who become bankers, or what happens to men who work at banks, but what we actually read on the page is that high-powered workplaces are hostile to women as women, not simply to women who don't subscribe to certain values. This just isn't true.
Investment banks are difficult environments characterized by brutal competition and backstabbing -- like lots of other human institutions. But unlike, for example, publishing houses or universities, they are also pretty damn meritocratic, as suggested by the recent ascension of black men to the position of COO at Merrill Lynch and head of investment banking at Credit Suisse First Boston. You may not approve of the merits selected for, but gender and race don't hinder those who have them.
Pearson also stacks the deck when it comes to divisions of responsibility in family life. We're told Kate's the main breadwinner. The real-life difference between a hedge-fund manager's income and an architect's is huge. It's even bigger when the architect, like Richard, is given to the "undercharging of clients he feels sorry for."
