WHEN SIMPLE ABUNDANCE ISN'T ENOUGH, TRY THIS BOOK

By Jill Smolowe

Women who hunger for more balance in their lives but find Sarah Ban Breathnach's recipes for achieving an "authentic self" unpalatable may find greater sustenance in Elizabeth Perle McKenna's When Work Doesn't Work Anymore. Where Ban Breathnach tries to cool women's overheated lives with a sprinkling of sachets, McKenna delves deep to identify and inspect the "indigestion in [women's] souls." What emerges as the chief gastric villain is a workplace that "makes no allowance for anything to be more important than work."

McKenna, who has been a publisher at three large book houses, argues persuasively that while the workplace has opened up to embrace women, its hierarchical structure and defining values remain steeped in the 1950s. Women like herself have ascended to executive posts primarily by internalizing the assumptions, expectations and standards of their male bosses. Over time, these women have discovered that the ethos of the "success culture"--more money, more power, more work hours--leaves ever less space for such essentials as family, friends, autonomy, even meaningful work. The result, McKenna writes, is an uneasy sense that they are "denying or postponing whole parts of themselves."

While it's hardly new to suggest that Superwoman was never anything more than a figment of the 1980s imagination, McKenna kicks the debate into the '90s with her exploration of the central place work occupies in women's lives. Her survey of 1,200 upscale boomers finds that once a woman makes a commitment to work, regardless of whether it's driven by financial or psychological incentives, work becomes essential to her identity. Thus, when competing claims on time force a reassessment, the issue for most women isn't whether to keep working; it's how to balance work with the rest of life.

As McKenna makes plain, that's easier said than done. Trading in the security of prestige, promotions and power lunches for the more ephemeral rewards of greater flexibility, balance and freedom may require a woman not only to rework her finances but also to retool her very identity. McKenna admits that after walking out on corporate life, "I felt like a nonperson." Though she'd left to pursue a career in writing, peers assumed she'd gone home to be a mommy--a common misperception about women who step off the conventional fast track. "The immediate defense is to devalue your intentions and actions," McKenna argues, because "rejecting what society values as the moral right path of success...[is] rebellious, treasonous."

Though only well-paid women, like those in her survey, may be able to heed McKenna's advice to trade some income for more time, all working men and women can benefit from her suggestions to learn how to fail, say no to bosses and assignments, and separate who you are from what you do. Such prescriptions for redefining worth and success are not abundantly simple, but they are abundantly sane.

--By Jill Smolowe