Dear Diary, Now What?  

Molly Young | The New York Times – October 17, 2016

For weeks now, there has been a billboard for “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” the movie, above the Holland Tunnel traffic in downtown Manhattan. Renée Zellweger’s startled pout overlooks what must be the city’s densest concentration of honking, exhaust-belching, rage-propelled vehicles. The street’s atmosphere is foul enough that it creeps onto the sidewalks bordering it; for a couple of months this summer, a sign posted at Broome and Thompson Streets begged people not to leave mounds of garbage on the corner. I point these things out because it’s rare to find a square inch of New York that has remained unchanged for roughly 15 years, and the same is true of both Hollywood actors and Hollywood output. Yet there, floating above the traffic, is Renée Zellweger’s perfect cream-puff face as Bridget Jones, and we might as well be living in 2001.

“Bridget Jones’s Baby” is the fourth of a series that began 20 years ago when Helen Fielding published “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” That book introduced a heroine who looks, in retrospect, like the female precursor of every man-child portrayed in a Judd Apatow comedy: an unambitious, horny, hapless individual with a heart of gold and a fluency in bathroom humor. In the first book and its successor, Jones tottered through a world booby-trapped with inappropriate sexual partners, meddling family members, smugly married acquaintances, indecipherable boyfriends and high-calorie microwaveable desserts. A third book, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” skipped forward to find Jones at 51 with two kids, a Nicorette dependence, and a keen anxiety about farting in yoga class.

The new novel scoots back in time again. When we meet her in “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” the narrator is in her late 30s, hung over and jamming a piece of cheese into her mouth. She has a glamorous job and a new car; she is suddenly and magically thin. As soon as she finishes eating her cheese, she’s going to a christening party.

Jones’s former beloved, Mark Darcy, shows up at the party (in a helicopter, for some reason) and proves to be newly single, which is the diarist’s cue to get apocalyptically drunk and sleep with him. In the morning, Darcy is rueful about the sex and tersely pre-empts any notion of reviving their relationship by stating that he doesn’t want to use up any more of Jones’s childbearing years. (Ow.) A short while later, Jones has a rebound assignation with the inveterate Lothario Daniel Cleaver. In a predictable twist of fate, she winds up pregnant. The question is: whodunit?

An amniocentesis might answer the question in days, of course, but Jones refuses the test because of a vague fear of needles, which allows for months of befuddled hilarity to ensue. And indeed, the diary offers some bawdy giggles here and there. When Jones’s mother asks if the baby is Mark’s, the answer she receives is less than encouraging: “Maybe. I mean, there’s at least a 50 percent chance.” “Bridget!” her mother gasps. “Did you have a threesome?” Not quite, but a comic ménage à trois plays out as Jones and the two pregnancy-adjacent males go baby shopping, attend childbirth classes and erupt into quarrels on every subject and in every shade of intensity. The montage practically films itself.

“Bridget Jones’s Baby,” the movie, is 123 minutes long. The book will take approximately the same amount of time to get through. Bridget Jones has never been a heroine of enchanting complexity, and if you choose to read this installment more than once, you will not glean new psychological insights or expose subtle gems of truth. Comparing her with the great diarists of fiction – Humbert Humbert, Cassandra Mortmain – is like comparing an Oreo to a gâteau de mille feuilles. Mentally, Jones is a teenager. Or maybe a tween. This has always been the case; her diaries come packed with capital letters for emphasis and italics for the same – gah! – reason. Exaggeration comes as naturally to her as cheese-absorption: She never walks when she can stomp and never feels mildly anxious when the opportunity to have a “total meltdown” presents itself; she has the attention span of a guppy, pukes in her friends’ cars, locks herself out in the rain, burns dinner, leaves chocolate on the sofa, breaks a glass while mixing batter and serves shard-spiked muffins to her guests anyway. Her employment status is in permanent jeopardy because of chronic tardiness and blistering incompetence.

Even leaving aside the mystery of her pregnancy, Jones’s life is a reel of dishevelment that is only plausibly charming in an attractive person of a certain class in a remote and fictional setting. Any other specimen of humanity making the same blunders would be too depressing to contemplate or to froth up into a light comic novel or to adapt into a movie with sassy music and penis jokes in the trailer. The newest of the Bridget Jones chronicles is, like all of Helen Fielding’s novels, well paced and well crafted, as symmetrical and solidly constructed as an Oreo, after all.