Bridget
Jones:
Mad
About the Boy
Justine Jordan
| The Guardian
- October 7, 2013
It’s always a jolt to remember that the first two Bridget Jones books,
published way back in the 90s, predated texting, tweeting, Facebook and
internet dating: the constant stream of personal updates pinging between
our devices in 2013. Her diary-style abbreviations, number-crunching
obsessiveness over trivia and jokey combination of self-exposure and
self-deprecation have had such an influence on the tone of social media
that we all sound like Bridget now.
So it’s no surprise that Helen Fielding was tempted to let Bridget
loose on what looks like her natural terrain. Think what opportunities
modern technology offers for embarrassment: the erroneously forwarded
email, the ill-advised drunken text, the disastrous internet date.
What’s surprising, and cheering, is that rather than freeze-framing
her as the eternal thirtysomething, Fielding has allowed Bridget to age
in real time, making her 51 (and in need of glasses to operate her
smartphone).
More shockingly, instead of the dissatisfied divorcee one might have
expected, Bridget is now a tragic widow. Mark Darcy has died a typically
noble death, leaving her with two small children, Billy and Mabel. These
days, as well as counting calories and alcohol units, she’s also
totting up nits on the comb and bags of grated cheese scoffed from the
fridge while making the kids’ supper.
Having had children late, and been bereaved, she’s once again out of
step with her friends, just as she was with the “smug marrieds” of
her 30s. Now Jude is on the internet dating not-so-merry go round, Tom
is obsessed with boutique hotel bargains on Laterooms.com, and glamorous
Talitha is refusing to countenance that 60 might be middle-aged. Time
has turned Daniel Cleaver from bad boy into sad case, unable to talk to
a woman without inquiring after the colour of her “panties” and only
good for a spot of inept babysitting.
And Bridget, after five years’ mourning, is looking to get back into
the dating game. But will the old rules still apply? “Everything has
changed since you were single,” says Talitha. “There was no texting.
There were no emails. People spoke on telephones. Plus, young women are
more sexually aggressive now, and men are naturally more lazy. You have
to, at the very least, … encourage.”
After launching herself on Twitter as @JoneseyBJ (“Cannot figure out
how to put up photo. Is just empty egg-shaped graphic. Is fine! Can be
photo of self before was conceived”) and waiting for the followers to
flood in, she hooks a “toyboy”, 29-year-old Roxster, whose
“ripped” body makes her the envy of her drooping middle-aged
friends. Cue many comic tweets and texts, and a surprising number of
fart and vomit jokes. There’s the familiar agonising, with
why-hasn’t-he-called replaced by why-hasn’t-he-texted, but mostly
Roxster is funny, sexy and adoring enough to fulfil any woman’s
wishes.
Which is part of the problem: Bridget has been given such a tragic
backstory, and the very grown-up burden of young fatherless children,
that there’s less traction to be had from dating niggles; and with so
much darkness there already, Fielding seems unwilling to write any more
in. There’s a new sentimentality, even slushiness, to her old subjects
of love, sex and loneliness; the familiar jaunty tone is reserved for
playground politics and the chaos and cuteness of bringing up children.
But while the anxiety of the urban singleton was a fresh subject for
comedy in the 90s, we’ve been reading this sort of thing for years, in
countless slummy-mummy columns and books by Allison Pearson or Gill
Hornby (all influenced, of course, by Fielding herself). There’s a
beautifully judged scene where Bridget is pierced with ridiculous
overwhelming love for her children, even as they poo and puke in the
grip of illness, but mostly the crushed rice cakes, lost car keys and
melon balls for the sports day picnic have been done to death.
Also, where Bridget in her 30s was an everywoman figure, here she’s a
very yummy mummy indeed. Darcy has left her financially secure, with no
need to work on anything but her improbable screenplay, an updating of
Hedda Gabler set in Queen’s Park. It’s up to Roxster, part of the
impoverished younger generation, to introduce her to the delights of the
night bus. It’s odd how posh contemporary comic writing about
motherhood tends to be, and Mad
About the Boy is no exception. As Bridget floats fragrantly around
her son’s school concert at a stately home, or wells up at the choir
service, all the while having heart-thumping encounters with a masterful
teacher, the book starts to seem less like a satire on modern life and
more like a good old Jilly Cooper.
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