WORDS: Robert Brown

“Bridget Jones is back,” bellows the mass-media in a rising wave not unlike the “Darkness Tsunami” into which Helen Fielding’s titular heroine finds herself plunged near the beginning of her newest diary. “Bridget Jones is back.” It says so, right there on the back of the book along with “Dating Rule Number 1: DO NOT TEXT WHEN DRUNK.” For singletons, former singletons, those for whom the 90’s already represent a bygone and kitschy era, the advent of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy means knowing grins, and a cheerful collapse into a familiar and beloved guilty pleasure. For some, however, it marks the return of one of the most depressing, destructive, and self-loathing chick-lit franchises of the past twenty years.

Bridget is now a widow (cue Twitter-storm of “How could she kill Mr. Darcy?!” exclamations) with two young children, one of whom has an affected lisp and a Wednesday Addams personality (she’s the cute one) and the other who seems to function mainly as a constant reminder of his own dead father. She’s also got a screenplay in the offing, a nanny, a cleaner, a house in a posh part of London, a 30 year-old “toyboy” named Roxster, her established coterie of Bollie-quaffing pals to chat to, and the entire occult science of social media to get her head around.

I’d be concerned about spoilers here but, well, there can’t really be any given that the book has no character development, no conflict, no tension, no real story to speak of, and is, frankly, 386 pages of incoherent, waste. Her children seem little more than a distraction or a source of “snuggles”; a potentially engaging addition to Bridget’s narrative reduced to little more than commodities or catchphrase producing bobbleheads. Likewise, the killing-off of Darcy is one of the most transparent acts of authorial laziness to be committed for some time. After all, if Bridget’s not a horny, frustrated singleton, how can Fielding keep us diverted with her disjointed orgy of eating, drinking, self-hating, body-monitoring, shagging, thinking about buying stuff, complaining about women who are thinner, or younger, or more successful, or all three at once, and being, generally, well, shit, until a man comes along and sorts the whole mess out?

I’m not going to talk about the Bridget Jones books being the worst thing to happen to feminism since the Salem Witch trials. Surely, though, in a time as tumultuous as this the last thing anyone needs is the renaissance of this vapid avatar of late 90s excess and idiocy. Surely no woman should be told, yet again, that life can only be made whole and functional when it is validated by the presence of someone “so masterful . . . such a MAN!”

I know. I’m being a stick-in-the-mud aren’t I? “Bridget is everywoman,” you’ll insist. “It’s post-feminist fun,” you’ll claim, devaluing any criticism of this terrifying brand of inanity. You may be right. Once upon a time Bridget’s thirty-something troubles may have spoken to a generation of women who felt out of place or were uncomfortable in a world that was getting louder and harder to be happy in. At 51 years of age, however, Bridget’s identikit ramblings sound more hollow and nauseating than endearing or sympathetic.

Now more than ever, Fielding’s heroine presents a view of the modern woman as nothing more than a series of mewling appetites; an entity entirely focused on appearance and consumerism, disconnected from any real sense of self-worth. No wonder this is Fielding’s goodbye to a character that even she must see at this point can only do more harm than good.