More than 15 years before whining fictional diarist Bridget Jones became the Brit-lit darling of the hour, whining fictional diarist Adrian Mole made Sue Townsend the best-selling author of 1980s England. As worldwide sales figures eventually proved, any reader who had ever been an unhappy teenager can instantly identify with the melodramatic adolescent hubris dripping from The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole. Using her protagonist's blinding naiveté and ruthless self-aggrandizement as a vehicle, Townsend toured her own working-class English community, making its private hurts and hurdles not only universally comprehensible, but also hilarious. As Adrian has matured, however, the series has lost some of its sense of fun. As a pathetic teenager, Adrian evoked a sort of snide, knowing sympathy, but as a 30-year-old who still acts like a pathetic teenager, he's half-contemptible, half-depressing. The Cappuccino Years finds him working as the chief chef of a trendy Soho restaurant which serves up the worst of prepackaged British food as haute cuisine. Eventually, a TV producer mistakes Adrian's huffy provincialism for ironic postmodern faux-provincialism, and hires him to front an ironic postmodern cooking show dubbed Offally Good! Meanwhile, his parents are staggering through yet another bout of unfaithfulness, his wife is divorcing him for "unreasonable behavior" (including a three-day fight over her sneezes, which he considers excessively theatrical), and his perennial love object Pandora Braithwaite is running for Parliament on what seems to be the Labor, lace, and leg ticket. The Cappuccino Years' wry satire takes wicked, enjoyable potshots at the undignified trivia of modern Britain, from the Teletubby craze to Bridget Jones herself. But Townsend's dealings with painful subjects such as Princess Diana's death, child neglect, and teen pregnancy shows that her brand of dark humor has also matured over the years. Unfortunately, Adrian hasn't. When he does, the series may have to end, but unless that happens, readers can look forward to Adrian Mole at 60, obsessing over his prostate the way he used to obsess over his zits. Even Bridget Jones' weight problems have more dignity than that.