SOURCE: “Female Trouble,” in National Review, Vol. 51, No. 13, July 12, 1999, p. 55.

In the following review, Klinghoffer compares Bridget Jones's Diary to several other contemporary works focusing on single women in their thirties, including Tama Janowitz's A Certain Age and Melissa Bank's A Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

The other day, in an e-mail to a friend, I mentioned that I was reading a bunch of new novels about unmarried women looking for love in the big city. The books were charming, funny, but sad. It was a simple observation, to which my friend—a normally sweethearted and pacific girl, who happens to be unmarried—replied in an electronic fury: “Of course they are sad! But the REASON they are sad does not lie in the women themselves, but in the men who ruin their lives. I doubt that you, as a man, will be able to truly understand...