Bridget Jones, super spy: Chick Lit goes to war.

AuthorCavanaugh, Tim

If you blinked last summer, you probably missed the year's most daring, unusual, and insane literary experiment. This one came not from the pen of John Barth or Philip Roth or David Foster Wallace, nor from one of our era's preening post-ironists, but from Helen Fielding, creator of the wildly popular Bridget Jones phenomenon. While her Jane Bond spy/counterterrorism novel Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination went unappreciated by fans and critics alike--a typical fate for works of art ahead of their time--it demonstrates why Fielding has been such a successful postmodern impresario and multimedia trickster figure.

Such a move would hardly have been necessary for the woman who almost single-handedly invented the Chick Lit fiction genre and undoubtedly invented the genre's most popular segment. (At last count the Bridget Jones franchise boasted two novels, two movies, several dating guides, a Happy Meal or two, and countless copycat books in which a single girl in a media-saturated echelon of New York, London, L.A., or another metropolis must choose between a charming cad and a slightly dull Mr. Right while fending off a beautiful and treacherous rival.) But it turns out that Fielding, like the rest of us, had to do some re-adjusting after the 9/11 attacks.

Thus, Olivia Joules probes an area of wish fulfillment that hasn't heretofore received much attention (and, given the book's lackluster performance, probably won't receive much more). At the heart of the novel is a woman's desire to get in there and kick some ass in the war on terrorism.

Considering the author's penchant for cultural borrowing and sly self-reference, it's not surprising that the book essentially transposes the familiar character types from the Fielding universe (heroine, cad, rival, and Mr. Right) to a globetrotting espionage adventure. Nor, considering the book's subject matter and context, is it surprising that Olivia Joules frequently flirts with questionable taste: When an Osama bin Laden look-alike is described as a "compelling mixture of soulful and powerful" with "finely drawn features, a straight nose, fine, arched brows, hooded brown eyes," and an "aristocratic" and "languid" bearing, you may find yourself swooning for all the wrong reasons.

Then again, that's a pretty apt physical description of bin Laden, and the conceit of an international terrorist as the ultimate dangerous dreamboat is, at the very least, an idea you don't run across every day. At...

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