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Summary
Summary
Bridget Jones, beloved Singleton and global phenomenon, is back with a bump in Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries.
8:45 P.M. Realize there have been so many times in my life when have fantasized about going to a scan with Mark or Daniel: just not both at the same time.
Before motherhood, before marriage, Bridget with biological clock ticking very, very loudly, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at the eleventh hour: a joyful pregnancy which is dominated, however, by a crucial but terribly awkward question - who is the father? Mark Darcy: honourable, decent, notable human rights lawyer? Or Daniel Cleaver: charming, witty, notable fuckwit?
9:45 PM It's like they're two halves of the perfect man, who'll spend the rest of their lives each wanting to outdo the other one. And now it's all enacting itself in my stomach.
In this gloriously funny, touching story of baby-deadline panic, maternal bliss, and social, professional, technological, culinary and childbirth chaos, Bridget Jones - global phenomenon and the world's favorite Singleton - is back with a bump.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The fourth installment of Fielding's wildly popular Bridget Jones franchise is a blessed event. Fielding heads back in time from the setting of Mad About the Boy to chronicle the quirky, body-obsessed heroine as a professional producer in her late 30s embracing an unplanned pregnancy. The father is either her first love, Mark Darcy, or her former boyfriend, TV celebrity Daniel Cleaver-she rules out an amniocentesis for a quick DNA analysis. Readers witness Bridget's sonograms, childbirth classes, and cravings for cheesy potatoes. "The thing is, just as there is a big gap between how people think they are supposed to be and how they actually are, there's also a gap between how people expect their lives to turn out and how they actually do," Bridget writes. No surprises here: Bridget falls in love with her baby-on-the-way at first scan and bumbles into the romantic ending everyone but her saw coming all along. Though it's likely her fans will have already seen the movie about her bumpy baby ride, they'll still appreciate reading about a Bridget who, though less agitated, is still entertainingly erratic and entirely endearing. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this fourth outing for the hapless heroine was written in order to 'monetise the brand' Perhaps the entertainment world has reached a consensus that people who watch films are not the same as people who read books: or that a book can be conceived, not as a novel at all, but as extended programme notes to the film or play spun out of some previous novel, ain Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The monetisation of the brand cracks open endless possibilities, but most of them relate to money. Anyway, Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries is published after the film; not long enough after that anyone can have forgotten, but not soon enough for it to have been a mistake. Besides being confusing to those of us attached to the natural order of things, this draws attention to some fundamental fictive and structural creases that the film had to iron out before it could work. Bridget is accidentally pregnant and doesn't know who the father is; in the book the two candidates are Mark Darcy, essentially unchanged since he was perfect, except that he is now imperfect in every respect, until he is perfect again; and Daniel Cleaver, still handsome, still manipulative, still a shagger, but now with strong notes of spinelessness, vanity, low cunning and self-pity, like vinegar coming through a wine. Daniel no longer makes any sense as a romantic prospect, so it's not a love triangle so much as sperm-roulette. He and Mark, with ever sketchier motives, attend an ante-natal class together and make catty, dog-obvious remarks. "'Can I have a volunteer to play doctor? How about you, Daniel?' '... Since opening up vaginas has been your life's work,' murmured Mark." Their toleration of one another makes no sense, especially as it transpires that Bridget and Mark's happy ending the last time around was kiboshed when she got into a clinch with Daniel at their engagement party. The film resolves this problem by killing Daniel off and replacing him with Jack, a one-night stand who becomes a plausible human being; without that change, Bridget's insistent eeny-meeny-miny-mo is tedious and repetitive, and her dilemma very easily resolved. The lackadaisical execution is most obvious in, but by no means limited to, the plot; the smug marrieds of Bridget's previous life have been replaced by smug mothers, who say things nobody has ever said: "You really should have some of your own, you know. Time's running out"; "Do you want to feel my bump? No, go on, feel it." There is a coyness around Bridget's age, which is problematic, since you get no sense of this unplanned pregnancy being the hard-stop of her fertility. This strips it of the urgency and vexed poignancy of the film, in which she is 43. Many set-pieces have the thinness of wish-fulfilment, the cad getting his comeuppance. Daniel's novel is reviewed live on air, with him sandwiched between the reviewers: "It's neurybathic, neretic, aureate, platitudinous, egregious, insensate, macaronic ..." "Total unreadable toss." The defence that this is amplification to comic effect would only work if a grain of it were true; instead, it is the opposite of the way social opprobrium is meted out, in sly asides and silences. At the level of the psyche, exposition has been hastily plastered on to rickety characterisation. Bridget's mother, confronted with her pettiness and slavish monarchism, readily admits: "It would mean that I meant something if the Queen sat next to me. I've never meant anything." Mark's character traits are suddenly entirely traceable to being sent to boarding school. It is to the reality of human intimacy what Disney is to birdwatching; people's most profound insecurities come out tentatively, they are conflicted, they are easily startled. Fielding presents them as cartoon starlings who flutter straight out and kiss you on the ear, then help you peg up your washing. Many of the big moments are written like notes for scenes the author intends to fill in later There's a fundamental lack of interest in details at the granular level; Bridget's vomit is sprayed liberally, to create embarrassing situations, quick exits, character demolitions, yet there's a link of the chain missing where the exaggeration of the pregnant condition turns into humour. A friend buys her a Bugaboo buggy, which is a fantastically expensive gift for one normal person to buy another, and either puts both of them in the realm of the super-rich, or makes it a statement of power or pity or... well, something. But it is none of those things, just an opportunity to point out that buggies are large. You can get used to the breezy, abbreviated diary form, but many of the big moments are written like notes for scenes the author intends to fill in later. "Back at Mum and Dad's house there were tears and drama"; "Whole thing erupted into a terrible shouting match"; "And then I nested. All through the rest of November, December and January I nested." "And we talked and we talked and we talked and we talked about everything that had happened, and why. And we made plans for how it was going to be." Especially since the film, which was irresistible -- and believe me, I tried -- I can't shake a residual fondness for Bridget; but this literary version was phoned in, a hazy half-world described for an unloved correspondent on the way to some more interesting story. - Zoe Williams.
Kirkus Review
One things for sure: one of these two ex-boyfriends is the father of Bridget Jones baby.What would the Dalai Lama do? Bridget asks herself when she arrives 15 minutes late to the christening of her friend Magdas baby in the opening pages of Fieldings (Mad About the Boy, 2013, etc.) fourth entry in this still-funny series about everyones favorite dizzy British blonde. The Dalai Lama would probably not proceed to shag her ex-boyfriend Mark Darcy, whom she hasnt seen in years and who was until very recently married to a stick insect but has been sneakily appointed godfather to the same baby. When Darcy comes to his senses and makes himself scarce post-shag, would the Dalai Lama proceed to get drunk and naked with another famous fuckwit, her ex-boss, pompous television personalityturned-novelist Daniel Cleaver? Well, you never know. Perhaps the Dalai Lama would prudently refuse to have amniocentesis to determine the paternity of the baby out of fear of harming both the fetus and the gauzy thing that passes for a plot in these pages. (Though if youve read the previous book in the series, set many years in the future, you know whose child it is.) Pregnant Bridget is caught between her perennially smashed and slurring singleton friends and the tedious Smug Marrieds: Guess what? Weve found you a nanny: Eastern European. Shes got a degree in neuroscience from the University of Vilnius. Distracted by her predicament, Bridgets job performance is not at 100 percent. When a new producer is brought in to clean house at Sit Up, Britain, demanding stories with tension, action, and suspense, Bridget scours the news to no avail. Theyre slimy, theyre creepily silentand theyre lurking in your arugulafrogs! Theyre hexagonal, they suddenly change their form and they gouge out your eyesumbrellas! One hopes the Dalai Lama gets his hands on this book as soon as possible. If he cant clear up the morality questions, hell at least get a good laugh. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Last we heard from Bridget Jones, in Mad about the Boy (2013), the beloved heroine was trying to get her groove back as a newly single mom. Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries, based on Fielding's columns in the Independent, takes place several years before that book, and is being released in conjunction with the third film in the franchise. It's been a rough few months for Bridget. First, after a dynamite reunion with her beloved ex, Mark Darcy, he tells her they can't be together lest he use up any more of her surely waning childbearing years. A few days later, she puts the notion that she's reached her sexual sell-by date to rest with none other than Daniel Cleaver, her other sexy ex, though that seems to go nowhere, too. So when a little blue line confirms that she's pregnant, she's thrilled. Letting rivals Mark and Daniel know that she can't be sure which of them is the father is messy business for sure, but it's Bridget's own identity crisis that she doesn't anticipate. Her Singleton friends are acting like she's no longer one of them, and though Bridget's pregnancy does put a damper on her partying, she's not rushing to become a Smug Married just because she has a bun in the oven. While Bridget lumbers over these new hurdles with her signature charm, predictably entertaining dramatics ensue between Mark and Daniel, while readers guess who the baby daddy is until the end of this little breeze of a book.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOR WEEKS NOW, there has been a billboard for "Bridget Jones's Baby," the movie, above the Holland Tunnel traffic in downtown Manhattan. Renée Zellweger's startled pout overlooks what must be the city's densest concentration of honking, exhaust-belching, rage-propelled vehicles. The street's atmosphere is foul enough that it creeps onto the sidewalks bordering it; for a couple of months this summer, a sign posted at Broome and Thompson Streets begged people not to leave mounds of garbage on the corner. I point these things out because it's rare to find a square inch of New York that has remained unchanged for roughly 15 years, and the same is true of both Hollywood actors and Hollywood output. Yet there, floating above the traffic, is Renée Zellweger's perfect cream-puff face as Bridget Jones, and we might as well be living in 2001. "Bridget Jones's Baby" is the fourth of a series that began 20 years ago when Helen Fielding published "Bridget Jones's Diary." That book introduced a heroine who looks, in retrospect, like the female precursor of every man-child portrayed in a Judd Apatow comedy: an unambitious, horny, hapless individual with a heart of gold and a fluency in bathroom humor. In the first book and its successor, Jones tottered through a world booby-trapped with inappropriate sexual partners, meddling family members, smugly married acquaintances, indecipherable boyfriends and high-calorie microwaveable desserts. A third book, "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy," skipped forward to find Jones at 51 with two kids, a Nicorette dependence, and a keen anxiety about farting in yoga class. The new novel scoots back in time again. When we meet her in "Bridget Jones's Baby," the narrator is in her late 30s, hung over and jamming a piece of cheese into her mouth. She has a glamorous job and a new car; she is suddenly and magically thin. As soon as she finishes eating her cheese, she's going to a christening party. Jones's former beloved, Mark Darcy, shows up at the party (in a helicopter, for some reason) and proves to be newly single, which is the diarist's cue to get apocalyptically drunk and sleep with him. In the morning, Darcy is rueful about the sex and tersely pre-empts any notion of reviving their relationship by stating that he doesn't want to use up any more of Jones's childbearing years. (Ow.) A short while later, Jones has a rebound assignation with the inveterate Lothario Daniel Cleaver. In a predictable twist of fate, she winds up pregnant. The question is: whodunit? An amniocentesis might answer the question in days, of course, but Jones refuses the test because of a vague fear of needles, which allows for months of befuddled hilarity to ensue. And indeed, the diary offers some bawdy giggles here and there. When Jones's mother asks if the baby is Mark's, the answer she receives is less than encouraging: "Maybe. I mean, there's at least a 50 percent chance." "Bridget!" her mother gasps. "Did you have a threesome?" Not quite, but a comic ménage à trois plays out as Jones and the two pregnancy-adjacent males go baby shopping, attend childbirth classes and erupt into quarrels on every subject and in every shade of intensity. The montage practically films itself. "Bridget Jones's Baby," the movie, is 123 minutes long. The book will take approximately the same amount of time to get through. Bridget Jones has never been a heroine of enchanting complexity, and if you choose to read this installment more than once, you will not glean new psychological insights or expose subtle gems of truth. Comparing her with the great diarists of fiction - Humbert Humbert, Cassandra Mortmain - is like comparing an Oreo to a gâteau de mille feuilles. Mentally, Jones is a teenager. Or maybe a tween. This has always been the case; her diaries come packed with capital letters for emphasis and italics for the same - gah! - reason. Exaggeration comes as naturally to her as cheese-absorption: She never walks when she can stomp and never feels mildly anxious when the opportunity to have a "total meltdown" presents itself; she has the attention span of a guppy, pukes in her friends' cars, locks herself out in the rain, burns dinner, leaves chocolate on the sofa, breaks a glass while mixing batter and serves shard-spiked muffins to her guests anyway. Her employment status is in permanent jeopardy because of chronic tardiness and blistering incompetence. Even leaving aside the mystery of her pregnancy, Jones's life is a reel of dishevelment that is only plausibly charming in an attractive person of a certain class in a remote and fictional setting. Any other specimen of humanity making the same blunders would be too depressing to contemplate or to froth up into a light comic novel or to adapt into a movie with sassy music and penis jokes in the trailer. The newest of the Bridget Jones chronicles is, like all of Helen Fielding's novels, well paced and well crafted, as symmetrical and solidly constructed as an Oreo, after all. Bridget totters through a world booby-trapped with inappropriate partners. MOLLY YOUNG is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.
