Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

by Juliet Fletcher

books

It's hard to know whether to welcome Helen Fielding's new novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (Viking), for its comic turns or its clever examination of fear. But hey, the latter's more topical. Whereas Bridget Jones, Fielding's now-infamous young character, grappled with self-conscious qualms about the wider world, the time has passed when an uplifting conclusion was, "Hey, we're all plagued by worry." So Fielding's newest lead-chick, Olivia Joules, brims with capability and true grit. A self-made lass from a dot on the map of northern England who's re-christened herself with the attractive-sounding name for energy units and has become a freelance journalist, Joules is in search of a fabulous lifestyle — and she finds it. Sent on a brainless face-cream assignment in Miami, she follows her nose to the heart of an A-1 story better suited to the international section. This is what fabulousness comes to mean: These encounters make great anecdotes (and great copy).

Unlike Jones, Joules finds that conquering fear isn't a vast undertaking, just a function of commonsense. (Creeping from journalism to espionage, there's delicious bathos as terrifying discoveries dissolve into farcically mundane ones.) Against the prime political-correctness directive governing at least this fictional U.S., Joules' attitudes are pointedly forthright. It's worth noting that Helen Fielding has a habit of placing her fictional characters tantalizingly close to her versions of real people, where they usually almost interact. (Osama bin Laden — the man himself — skates through the edge of Joules' story the way, in Bridget Jones, her imagined romance with actor Colin Firth remains an almost-possibility.) It's not — as it first seems — just fiction getting carried away, but a balance to the idea that, as individuals, we're all little balls of energy with the potential for quick-thinking action and interaction. Fabulousness isn't posing with a cocktail glass, but showing up and getting things done.

Helen Fielding reads, Thu., June 17, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.