No fun

Bridget Jones doesn't get it

by Camille Dodero

BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON. By Helen Fielding. Viking, 338 pages, $24.95

I wasn't surprised when a male friend derided Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary as a "chick book" -- especially given that Bridget's pursed-red lips are smattered all over supermarket checkout aisles alongside Cosmo, Soap Opera Digest, and Marie Claire. Yet I was surprised, or at least disheartened, to find excerpts from the follow-up to Helen Fielding's bestseller, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, in the February Vogue. Back in '98, when Viking rowed the British author's fictional alter ego across the Atlantic and published Bridget Jones's Diary here in the States, the implication was that these diaries were palatable self-parody, a satirical set of Cliffs Notes for Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. And when every third woman on the T was cradling an open copy, it seemed everybody was in on the joke: Bridget Jones was a fictional mockumentary of a single woman, a postmodern anti-heroine whose shameless obsession with men and Cosmo-ish calorie-counting consistently undercut feminism's progress. The book was a roast, and every woman who's ever shackled herself to the phone was the guest of honor, right? Right?

For once, Vogue shed some light. The glamor mag backed the entries with five glossy storyboard panels depicting "Modern Love" as "Today's most stylish young couples" who "both live and look great together." In Vogue-speak, that means Elizabeth Shue draped in Duchesse-satin, "sharing an alfresco afternoon" with her Guggenheim hubby and bare-bottomed cherubic toddler. Did I mention that they're posed in a garden?

Hold the phone, wasn't Bridget a sucker punch to the demographic that eats this stuff up? Wasn't Fielding cracking on these airbrushed pantheons? Or is this author so crafty that she's managed to mock Vogue in Vogue? The answer is: there is no answer. At least there isn't one in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Not only is the book mostly bereft of irony, it's little more than one woman's self-absorbed longing for modern love Vogue-style.

The Edge of Reason's shallow pursuit begins four weeks after our fag-smoking narrator has landed one of Tatler magazine's 50 most eligible bachelors, an überlawyer named Mark Darcy. For more than a month, Bridget enjoys what she terms a "functional relationship with a responsible adult," until a series of misunderstandings causes Mark to suspect Bridget of cheating on him. Soon after, the relationship deteriorates and her diaries relapse into the same glib soliloquy that was tolerable in the first book only under the guise of social commentary.

As Bridget takes refuge in self-help books like The Road Less Traveled and How To Find Your Perfect Partner in Thirty Days, her musings oscillate between bloated self-depreciation ("To sum it up, what I really am is a lonely, ugly, sad act gagging for sex") and feigned self-confidence ("Am assured, receptive, responsive woman of substance. My sense of self comes not from other people but from . . . from . . . myself? That can't be right."). She commiserates with her best single girlfriends Shazzer and Jude and half-heartedly tries to refocus her career, then travels to Thailand, where she ingests a "magic mushroom omelet" and gets arrested. Mostly, she ends up waxing about mindless crap.

There used to be a Jar-Jargonizer on the Web that rendered all Net sites into Jar-Jar Binks's lexicon. (Weesa so sorry, it's now-defunct.) The Bridget Jones equivalent, a Bridget-babblator, would translate politics into "Tony Blair is the first Prime Minister I can completely imagine having voluntary sex with"; spirituality into "Where else to turn for spiritual guidance to deal with problems of modern age if not self-help books?"; and lesbianism into "Am going swimming to Hampstead Pond with Jude and Shazzer! Have not done legs but Jude says pond is ladies only and teeming with lesbians who consider it mark of gay pride to be as hairy as yetis. Hurrah!"

A major caveat The Edge of Reason faces is its protagonist's past popularity. Fielding has already inked a movie deal for the first novel, and as the London Observer points out, "Bridget terminology has slipped into common parlance." Like it or not, Bridget has become a feminine archetype. But as far as modern feminine archetypes go, she's so self-engorged she's built-to-spill. My So-Called Life's Angela Chase wielded keener introspection in her interior monologue, cartoon maid Amelia Bedelia made scatterbrained charm more endearing, and Elizabeth Wurtzel's psychedelic trips in Prozac Nation were much more entertaining than Bridget's. Hell, Scooby Doo did more with hallucinogenic insight.

And speaking of insight: Bridget's at a loss even when she's imprisoned in Thailand. "Good things about being in jail: 1. Not spending money. 2. Thighs have really gone down and have probably lost at least seven pounds without trying. 3. Will be good for hair to leave it without washing such as have never been able to do before as hair too mad-looking to go outside."

Is this personification of the self-indulgent, cellulite-measuring, soulless culture of single women accurate? Maybe. Is the book's irony lost on the ignorant? Possibly. Is Bridget Jones everywoman? My arse.