Bridget Jones’ middle age hilarious
Print Edition
Do we really want to hear about the middle-aged escapades of Bridget Jones, the tipsy, ditsy, formerly 30-ish heroine of two previous novels and two previous movies? Hapless, inept, prone to romantic calamity, lurching from one mishap to the next through a hazy fog of faux pas and cigarette smoke, Bridget was so specific to her age that allowing her to reach 51 feels like a violation of the natural order of the fictional universe, as if a new Harry Potter book had him using magic to refinance his mortgage.
So what a pleasant shock to find that the latest Bridget Jones installment, “Mad About the Boy,” is not only sharp and humorous, despite its heroine’s aged circumstances, but also snappily written, observationally astute and at times genuinely moving.
A lot has changed since we last said goodbye to Bridget, who at the end of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” seemed poised to find happiness with dreamy Mark Darcy, the human-rights lawyer she loved. She has been married and widowed, Mark having been tragically killed in a land-mine accident in Sudan five years earlier.
There are the usual ridiculous situations: Bridget’s son’s gym teacher spots her carrying informational leaflets about gonorrhea and syphilis that her daughter swiped; Bridget mistakenly calls the too-perfect class mother Nicorette instead of Nicolette (the name, she notes, was “presumably chosen by parents before invention of popular smoking substitute”); Bridget repels a potential suitor on their first date by blurting out, “If we have sex will you promise you’ll call me and see me again?”
Most of the book is written in the easy, breezy shorthand Fielding perfected in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” with its dearth of pronouns and articles. (“Think will have small glass of wine.”) We get some good long narration, but large chunks of the book come in diary form, introduced by select statistics of the day, hilariously expanded to reflect grown-up Bridget’s grown-up concerns: the number of lice she finds in her children’s hair; the number of Twitter followers she loses after sending dumb drunken tweets; the percentage of her day she devotes to texting and worrying about texting. (“Texts from Roxster 0,” she writes of one boyfriend. “Number of times checked for texts from Roxster 4,567.”)
This is romantic comedy — chick-lit, really — but its big heart, incisive observations, nice sentences, vivid characters and zippy pace make it a book you could happily spend the night with. And Bridget’s amorous adventures — the uncomplicated 29-year-old who reintroduces her to the joys of sex, and then the seemingly unlikely, but actually perfect, chronically amused man she falls for in the end (this would be Daniel Craig) — make the prospect of middle age not so bad at all.
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