Still Single, Still Smoking
 
Bridget Jones is back - and lusting after Tony Blair.

By Carla Power, Newsweek International - November 29, 1999

 

Life is full of guilty pleasures, and reading Bridget Jones's diary is one of them. It's a bit self-indulgent to tuck yourself in with frappe-light musings by a fictional Londoner who opens most journal entries with her weight. But 3 million people have - including Japanese, Slovenians and Finns. When "Bridget Jones's Diary" was published in 1996, it lurked at the top of American and British best-seller lists for months. British novelist Helen Fielding's book, loosely based on "Pride and Prejudice," launched a whole modern-novel genre ("chick lit"), inspired a movie script and spurred op-ed-page debates about whether the thirtysomething heroine was a symbol of feminism's failure or success. Fielding's new book, "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," is dedicated to "the other Bridgets," of whom there are many. When Fielding went on book-signing tours, female fans would accost her, claiming "I am Bridget Jones!" 

These are brave women. For to identify with Bridget Jones is to admit a lifelong quest for "inner poise," and a "singleton's" deep-seated suspicion of Smug Marrieds. It is to resign oneself to lusting after Prince William and Tony Blair - "the first prime minister I can completely imagine having volunteer sex with." It is to admit to taking a copy of Vogue to Kensington Palace after Princess Diana's death by way of a tribute to her. For to identify with Bridget Jones, television researcher and Notting Hill resident, is to identify with an avid consumer of Silk Cuts, Chardonnay and self-help manuals with titles like "If Buddha Dated," and to define the word "emergency" as the moment "lacy pants have begun to leave patterns on self." But being Bridget's soulmate is also to possess a sixth sense for the Zeitgeist, a clutch of faithful friends and bags of Panglossian optimism. When our heroine lands in a Thai prison cell - don't ask - she duly notes down its good points: "1. Not spending any money. 2. Thighs have really gone down..." 

Still, Bridget's charming patter ultimately overshadows what there is of the second volume's plot. Her affair with the devastatingly handsome human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy and her work as a researcher on a television show called "Sit Up Britain" form the sketchy structure, and the book's Big Themes - the by-now familiar confusions of modern dating, self-help books as a new religion - tend to clunk. Fielding, a 41-year-old former journalist who, like Bridget, is unmarried and lives in London, is perhaps less a novelist than a sketch-writer. But like that other gifted commentator Woody Allen, she makes modern urban neuroses, if not art, then at least very, very funny.