The second installment of Bridget Jones’ neurotic life is more eventful and more upbeat than the first. As in the prior book, the story is in diary form, which keeps it fast-paced and fun. The book is stylistically similar to the first, and is just as much fun to read. Fans of the movie will enjoy finding out what happens next in her life, especially concerning her ill-fated romance with Mark Darcy.

Bridget’s life is just as much as a mess as before, but she’s a little wiser in her choices, or at least, the mistakes she makes are more obviously correctable. She still immerses herself in self-help literature (The Road Less Travelled and You Can Heal Your Life are her favorites, but she has 47 others on her shelf) and she views the tenets of self-help as equivalent to a religious world view. Happily, she does come to see the downside of self-help, and she ends up throwing out most of her collection.

As in the Diary, Bridget’s main struggle in life is in finding a boyfriend, or in coming to terms with life as a "Singleton" and dealing with the taunts of "Smug Marrieds." She has a dependable group of friends, but the people she most relies on are Jude and Shazzer, and she consults with them on every development in her life. She holds down a pretty good job in TV, and she even manages to do an interview with a movie star for a national newspaper. She also owns her own apartment, and she manages that with some success, although for most of the novel there is a large hole in one of the outside walls covered by heavy plastic, and although she gave a builder a large sum of money to do some building, he has stopped returning her phone calls. It seems that she will never see the builder or her cash again, but she eventually sorts out the problem. Maybe living in the moment really pays off, but of course what is funny about Bridget is that she mostly does not live in the moment: she worries, drinks too much, smokes more than she should, and consumes more calories than she wants to. She reflects on all her troubles and victories in detail in her diary entries and analyses the meaning of her life with fellow experts Jude and Shazzer.

In my review of the prior volume, I suggested that Bridget might try taking Prozac in order to deal with her anxieties. It’s possible that it would have helped, but Edge of Reason gives the message that she can cope on her own. Of course, she lives with a great deal of miscommunication, mishaps, worry, and even danger, but considering her crazy family, she is doing pretty well.

Categories: Fiction