About halfway through reading Helen Fielding's new Bridget Jones novel, Mad about the Boy, I realized that something was missing--a re-casting of one of Jane Austen's plots. This might seem unimportant (and obvious), but may also explain why the plot feels, well, a bit slack.
Here's what I mean: without the framework--even broadly adapted--of a Jane Austen novel, the plotting for this novel seems to meander. It starts out in the present, then it moves backward in time, but that movement back in time requires more flashbacks to explain Mark Darcy's death. I don't quite understand why the first shift in time was necessary, and it made the jump forward--to the "real time" of Bridget's relationship with her Toy Boy--less interesting.
To be honest, I found this new installment dull at times (that is, when I wasn't tearing up over Mark Darcy's death), and that was partly because the plot didn't seem to have a whole lot of tension. I wasn't that caught up in Bridget's obsession with Roxster, and I wanted her to stop texting during meetings (I know that's absurd, but there it is). The ending also feels rushed, even though Fielding has been planting clues all along.
This wandering plot feels a bit like the one non-Bridget Jones novel by Fielding that I read many years ago, Cause Celebre. Cause Celebre also felt sort of meandering, and that's what makes me wonder if the plotting of the first two Bridget Jones novels needed the Austen underlay, not just because of the ways that they updated the Austen story (and Fielding gives a sly nod to this practice by having Bridget reinvent her own career by updating classics), but because of the way that they structured the plot.
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