Word: bridget
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Fielding knows when she's on to a good thing: this sequel avoids making Bridget relationship-bound, and duplicates many of the elements of the initial diary, incomplete sentences and all. The diet books of the first diary may have been replaced by self-help ones, but Bridget's pick-and-mix approach, choosing only the advice she enjoys, remains, as do the dynamics of her tripartite friendship with Jude and Shazzer. As they work their way through their various relationships, that friendship is both funny and genuinely warm. The casual acceptance of smoking, alcohol use and sex (aside: could...
...some ways, Bridget resembles a latter-day version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, caught as she is a picaresque series of adventures and winning goodwill from both other characters and readers by dint of sheer charisma (and some aid from Mark Darcy). Admittedly, those adventures include perhaps the weak point of the novel, when Bridget is framed for smuggling drugs in Thailand, which seems to be the excitement-and-terror locale du jour (see Brokedown Palace or The Beach). Out of urban London, Bridget's neuroticism seems hopelessly out of context: for all her moaning in her diary...
...Having topped the U.K. book charts for weeks, The Edge of Reason lands in the U.S. in time to dethrone that other recent British publishing colossus Harry Potter. Popular reaction to the original Bridget Jones Diary, which like Potter was initially feared too British in character to sell in America, was overwhelming and the book eventually sold 4 million copies world wide. It wasn't solely a publishing phenom, either; the surprise felt by critics when what seemed to be merely a Cosmo Beach Book of the Week actually turned out to be a well-crafted piece was palpable. Indeed...
...That success was in large part due to the consistency of Bridget's character and voice. Whether Bridget is a postfeminist heroine or an antifeminist throwback seems secondary to that fact. At first glance merely flighty and airy, the actual brilliance of that comic voice can be seen by the pale attempts by other authors in the intervening years to replicate that light tone successfully. While Bridget is too detailed at points to read like a diary ("7.32 a.m. Except do not have any mushrooms or sausages. 7.33 a.m. Or eggs."), as interior monologue it's genius. The punning title...
...Still, Fielding undercuts criticism by employing a bit of self-parody. Recognizing the potential silliness of Bridget's obsession with Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy on TV's "Pride and Prejudice"), the author exaggerates it by giving Bridget an over-the-top interview opportunity with the man himself (part of the in-joke is that Bridget is writing for the Independent, the same newspaper where Bridget herself was created in a spoof column by Fielding). Bridget falling over herself to ask Firth about the diving scene in Pride and Prejudice ("what I mean is did you ever have to take...