Just when it seems there cannot, and should not, be room for one more breezy, boss-bashing, boyfriend-stalking chick-lit novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination is challenging the collective conscious.
If Joules' name is unfamiliar, her creator's is surely not: She is Helen Fielding, the British novelist who eight years ago unleashed the publishing equivalent of a tsunami with Bridget Jones's Diary.
That slim ode to lovelorn British singletons of the 1990s became the Da Vinci Code of its day, selling more than 10 million copies in 35 countries. It was made into the hit 2001 film starring Renee Zellweger, who will reprise her role as the pudgy, witty English heroine in the film adaptation of the book's best-selling sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, this fall.
It also transformed its author, then 39, from a little-known freelance journalist into a global
publishing franchise and a role model for legions of aspiring young women who went on to create the chick-lit genre, examples of which continue to flood bookstores almost weekly.
In fact, in 1997 when the paperback edition of Bridget Jones's Diary had reigned on best-seller lists in England for more than a year, Fielding grew so weary of being asked if she was the model for her man-crazy, perpetually dieting, alcohol-units-consuming, cigarette-smoking protagonist that she pondered taking what Bridget would call v. drastic action.
"At one point I was going to put a sign around my neck that said, `No, I am not Bridget Jones,' just so I could quietly snooze," said Fielding, as she alternately sipped a cappuccino and a strawberry-banana iced drink in the Sunset Strip coffeehouse that has doubled as her office since she moved to Los Angeles five years ago. "Bridget wasn't me," she added pointedly. "She was an exaggeration of bits of me."
Now comes Olivia Joules, named for a character who, although still loosely modeled on its author, might best be described as the anti-Bridget. Instead of a low-level publicist mooning over boyfriends at boozy London dinner parties, Olivia is a self-made, self-confident, globe-trotting style writer turned international spy, who quaffs martinis while hunting operatives of al-Qaeda in Miami, Africa, Los Angeles and the Caribbean.
Fielding readily concedes she has abandoned Jane Austen -- whose novel Pride and Prejudice was famously the model for Bridget Jones's Diary -- for Ian Fleming's James Bond.
"The summer after Sept. 11, I got a DVD package of all the James Bond movies and just watched them," said Fielding, who is known among her friends as an experienced and adventurous traveler. "I found myself thinking, `What if?' and `How would I cope?' if I were in a similar situation."
Fielding's post-9/11, Jane Bond-like heroine is the result of that marathon viewing session, the study of several how-to-write-a-thriller handbooks and dramatic changes in her own life. "Olivia is what Bridget would be if she made peace with herself," she said, "if she stopped worrying about her weight and what people expected of her, but just made the decision to get on with things."
Whether the character will define her times as powerfully as Bridget Jones did, sending the navel-gazing genre in a new direction, remains to be seen. When Olivia Joules was published in Britain in November, it hit the best-seller list for 10 weeks, but reviews were mixed. Some critics complained that Olivia and her adventures were too far removed from the kind of closely observed realism and, as one critic put it, "miserable edge" that helped make Bridget such an appealing character.
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