Bridget Jones: Mad
About the Boy Katy
Guest | The Independent – October 13, 2013
So,
let’s list disappointing items in manner of slightly desperate
51-year-old channelling Sex in the City, Friends and bad
BJ-parody. 1) The infantilising/fabulous best friends: “10:45pm.
Doorbell … Was Tom and Jude, both completely plastered, stumbling into
the hallway giggling. ‘Mwah! Bridget! You’ve lost SO much
weight!’” Jude, who “now practically runs the City” and
occasionally says things like “just put a stop order of two million
yen at a hundred and twenty-five” to prove it, also appears in
Bridget’s kitchen “in her baggie onesie and big fluffy socks”.
Isn’t it quite a busy job, running the City? 2) The Americanisation:
the smug married school gate parents “patronize”, Bridget
“prioritizes” and obsessively chronicles her weight in lbs (no st
– v annoying!), and Daniel Cleaver, the randy old goat, constantly
wants to talk about her “panties”. 3) The constant texting in effort
to look modern: nobody, Bridget, texts their toyboy under the table
during a v important meeting about their screenplay. Stop it. But,
that’s all. When smug patronisers asked Joseph Heller why he had never
written a novel as good as Catch 22, he used to reply: “Who
has?” Helen Fielding has earned the right to say the same. Her
newspaper columns, and first novel, defined a generation, changed the
vocabulary of singleton life, gently satirised the have-it-all fallacy,
and spawned an entire genre of poor imitations that still bore readers
today. Having once skewered the embarrassing preoccupations of
apparently most of the nation’s women, you can’t do it again. So you
have to write a different book. The
best bits of this one are the ones furthest from anything the original
Bridget could imagine. A beautiful set-piece spread over a long dark
night of the children’s bowels, which ends with a moment of
heart-breaking tenderness and the realisation: “Diarrhoea and sick …
on vaguely sexual nightie. Resolved to go down to washing machine (ie
fridge to get wine).” A laugh-out-loud treatise on the “Rules of
Dating” in the internet age. Taking out a friend’s hair extensions
after they catch head lice: “A bit like Anne Hathaway dying of a bad
haircut in Les Misérables, except more moaning and crying.” Readers
who are parents might relate most to the moments when our heroine curls
up in a bunk bed with a nitty child, overwhelmed by love. I choked at
the scenes in which her hilariously irritating mother is finally given
her story. If you don’t cry when Bridget’s mum suddenly stops
“soldiering on” with Una and admits how lonely she is as a widow,
you have a heart harder than Daniel Cleaver’s. “It was the first
time I’d actually felt Mum’s bouffe,” relates Bridget, as they hug
each other on her kitchen floor. The
boy of the title provides comic relief, and the line that perhaps sums
up the whole book: “But surely it is not normal to be too vain to put
on your reading glasses to nit-comb your toy boy?” But he’s
obviously not the new Mark Darcy. If you spot the “new sports
teacher” who is “rather like Daniel Craig in appearance” and
immediately start counting down to a happy ending, snow, and an
uplifting disco soundtrack, you’ve spotted the new Mark Darcy.
(That’s not really a spoiler, unless you have never read a Bridget
Jones book or seen a romcom.) What
Fielding always did best was use modern frustrations to fondly lampoon a
particular sort of vanity and pretentiousness that secretly everyone
has. (Come on, what’s the first thing you remember about Chechnya?)
She still does. Such as when Jude says: “Bridget. Sleeping with a
29-year-old off Twitter on a second date is not ‘Rather like in Jane
Austen’s day’.” The
comic cultural references still hit home, except when the culture she
references is Bridget Jones. The themes are fascinating and she’s
still funny. She should ignore the passes and keep trying. |