"Cover yourself both ways? 'Happy to Be Single' with 'How to Find Your Perfect Partner in 30 Days'? 'Buddhism Made Simple' with 'Going for It' by Victor Kiam?"įielding knows how to keep a plot moving. "Are you supposed to read them in pairs?" Mark asks. Fielding throws in some amusing satire of the self-help mentality as Bridget attempts to run her life according to wisdom gleaned from an endless supply of mutually contradictory titles. With Mark Darcy having turned into a bona fide boyfriend, Bridget is finally doing all right in the shag department - and her glee suggests that what Americans would call her "body issues" aren't putting a crimp in things.īut now Bridget has to figure out how to deal with some pressing new life concerns, like keeping the relationship going while remaining in constant communication with her singleton girlfriends Jude and Shazzer. It's an inspired comic device, having Bridget tally up the day's numbers - weight and later, cigarettes smoked, alcohol consumed, assorted triumphs and humiliations - before reporting on events in her madcap telegraphic shorthand, grasping desperately all the while for a sense of control. (total fat groove), boyfriends 1 (hurrah!), shags 3 (hurrah!), calories 2,100, calories used up by shags 600, so total calories 1,500 (exemplary). In fact, the book opens by diving right back into the formula:ġ29 lbs. Fielding hasn't even downplayed Bridget's much-remarked-on weight obsession. Fielding has not bowed to criticism - Bridget is no more self-assured no less dependent on a boyfriend for her self-image no less a flighty, neurotic, work-avoiding wreck this time around.
Happily for those who appreciated the self-mocking, literate-chick humor of the original, "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" is just as much fun. Plans for a sequel were talked about, but how could Fielding possibly keep the franchise going after all that hoo-ha? Would an oversaturated reading public turn up their noses at another dose of Bridget?
(Unmarried women in their 30s! Now there's a story.) The book's very success seemed to set off the frenzy, and when less talented - and much less funny - writers like Laura Zigman and Melissa Bank set out to plow the same territory, it looked as though Helen Fielding's effervescent creation might become a casualty. No, "Bridget Jones's Diary" was not "Anna Karenina." But it's too bad this buoyant, clever, self-consciously slight book got caught up in a media-created New Social Phenomenon.
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