SOURCE: “Keeping Up with Ms. Jones,” in Village Voice, June 30, 1998, pp. 157–59.

In the following review, Daum analyzes the role of popular culture in Bridget Jones's Diary.

Bridget Jones's Diary, the bestselling British novel just out in the U.S., concerns itself almost entirely with the neurotic fallout of popular women's culture. Its narrator is a victim of women's magazines, self-improvement rituals, and much of the detritus that whirls around the Mars/Venus landscape. In effect, the book spits on the Manolo Blahnik shoes of the whole institution. So it's ironic that the American women's media machine has declared soul sisterhood with Bridget. Vogue published an excerpt that mostly chronicled the narrator's obsession with dieting, there have been several comparisons to Ally McBeal, and Jane magazine claimed its readers would be wondering how the author got into their diaries. The novel is, without a doubt, immensely entertaining. But what...