Briefly Noted

BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY

  by Helen Fielding

The New Yorker - October 21, 2013

In the weeks leading up to this book’s publication, fans were treated to some distressing revelations: Mark Darcy has been killed by a land mine in Sudan, leaving Bridget, aged fifty-one, to bring up the couple’s two children. At the start of the book, the family is infected with head lice. Later, Bridget finds a lover almost half her age, gets confused by the multiple remotes for the TV, and is perpetually late getting the kids to school. The novel has tender and comic moments, but there are cringe-inducing ones, too, as when characters say “You go, Girl!” unironically. The original Bridget Jones launched a genre because she captured the zeitgeist; in midlife, she feels interchangeable with the characters of Fielding’s many imitators.