Twilight
Well, my baby sister was reading it, on account of she wanted to find out what all the other girls are squealing about, and when she was done with it, I made the mistake of deciding that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to observe firsthand what exactly a certain publishing phenomenon was all about. Plus, I thought, how bad could it really be?
I think you can probably guess the answer to that last question easily enough.
To be fair, though, I didn’t start out hating it right away. My hatred sort of came together gradually, the specific ingredients of my dislike forming a kind of repugnance stew, which simmered for several hundred pages until I had a raging boner of detestation, after which I climaxed with a spurt of
severe disapproval.
Now … where to begin? I guess a good place would be with Ms. Meyer’s actual writing ability. Well, I mean, she can string a sentence together. The problem lies in the kind of sentence she likes. She has a thing, it would seem, for detailing the current state of her heroine’s lover’s eyes. She is also fond of seeing how many times a page she can tell us that the good vampire Edward has partaken to laugh. Seriously, if anyone laughed that much in real life, their jaw would hurt after a while. Trust me, I know, because I have had this happen to my jaw. And I am only an
intermittent laugher, as it were.
One major problem with the book is extremes. No one is
merely beautiful, or merely clumsy; instead, they are so motha-fokkin’ beautiful and sniffable that the very scent of them sends the sniffer into a drunken stupor. As for the clumsy part, stars above. Speaking as an insanely clumsy person myself, I was somewhat disturbed at the extent of Bella’s clumsiness. It is so bad that the vampires spend half the book carrying her around like a wishy-washy, bottom-lip biting doll. Jesus McTitty-Christ, can the damned girl not get around herself? I guess it goes along with the whole prince-sweeping-you-off-your feet thing, but I thought that was supposed to be figurative.
The being dragged around business invariably leads us to the competence of the main character. She has none, basically. She is a completely brainless, senseless moron, who can’t get around by herself half the time, is always being saved by her cold-nippled lover boy, and who is never, ever, disturbed by any revelation whatsoever, including the one concerning the aforementioned cold-nippled lover boy
spying on her in her sleep and listening to her calling his name. The weird thing is that her lack of sense (and self-preservation) is a major bone of contention between herself and the good Edwardo; it is as though the novel
champions the fact that its main character is a weak, senseless twit.
Speaking of bones of contention between Bella and Edward, their conversations almost always include some weirdly halting and odd argument. Edward’s mood swings are, like every other aspect of his character, bizarrely cartoonish in their intensity. I’m not sure how many bleeding times, by the end of the novel, we had to be treated to a bit in which he says something, she says something, he goes off the handle, she says something else, and he comes back to having whatever color eyes he has when he’s thinking of bees, trees, and blue birds doing each other up the drainpipe. He’s not some moody brooding vampire figure; he’s abso-bally-lutely
mad off his tits.
Unfortunately that brings us to the subject of the
kind of vampires that populate Ms. Meyer’s gooey fantasyland. First I am going to give a disclaimer: I am not one of these purists who has to see certain aspects of a completely fictional creature included in order for a story to satisfy me. When I read this book, even having heard of the infamous sparkling, I did so anyway with an open mind, prepared to give the good Ms. Meyers the benefit of the doubt.
She skunked me again.
The sparkling is just the tip of the iceberg, the thing most easily made fun of. I have read in an interview that Meyer was not into vampires and in fact has not even read Dracula. It shows, and in more than the sparkling. Aside from the desire for blood (and even this is treated a tad weirdly), these ‘vampires’ come across more like super-human beauty-pageant winners. They’ve got super-speed, super-sperm, super bear-eating, super car-lifting, super good smexy-ass looks, and (get this) are frequently referred to as moving in a feline-like manner.
Feline.
What are they, fucking cat people? What happened to bats?
I really do think Meyers wanted to be writing Spiderman. Not only did she have Bella jokingly speculate that the reason Edward is so goddamn weird might be on account of he was bitten by a radioactive spider, but there was a near-rape scene in which I half-expected Edward to leap out of the car when saving her, beat the baddies up, and conclude the proceedings by kissing her upside down in the rain.
Also, on the subject of kissing and passion and whatnot. This whole book is one big fucking tease. Whereas I probably would have had them fuck each other’s tits off by page 205, we are treated to more scenes than I’d care for of the protagonists sitting about on beds like big sissies sniffing each other’s sparkly, pearly white skin while ruffling, stroking, and generally touching each other’s mop tops in an entirely inappropriate manner.
Won’t somebody think of the hair strands?!
Though to be fair, the subject of sex isn’t completely sidestepped. It is revealed that, as the conversation about Superman in Mallrats implied, having sex with a magical superbeing is probably not a good idea. Not only might he blast your back out with his sparkly man-juice, he might also forget himself and have you for lunch, your blood being the beverage of choice.
Now, look. I know I’ve yapped on for quite a bit by this point, but to be honest I could almost (emphasis on ALMOST) live with all the aforementioned aspects of the book (and some I haven’t even gone into on account of I haven’t got all bloody week). I would merely pass it off as a haltingly written piece of wish-fulfillment romance for insecure young girls. Offensive, yes, but not the end of the literary world. But the thing that offends me the most deeply manifests itself somewhere nearly four-hundred pages in.
That’s about when she decides she wants a plot. You know, with conflict (that is, conflict other than Edward getting pissed that his girlfriend is such a suicidal, clumsy moron, and the fact that poor Bella is admired by every young boy whose balls ever dropped).
I am of course referring to the scene in which the ‘vampires’ are playing ball, which culminates in a maniac tracker vampire wanting Bella resting sloshily in his guts. This comes so late in the game, that it’s as though an entirely new story is beginning. One is left to wonder where this book’s beginning, middle and end are. As far as story-structure goes, this book is skunked in no uncertain manner. Not only that, but the Cullen family realize exactly what kind of ruffian they are dealing with, and how much he will be after Bella … so why don’t they just hand his ass to him RIGHT THEN AND THERE, with the full strength of the family present? It was, what, five or six well-fed, well-disciplined vamps against three vagabonds? It could have saved the next hundred pages. Unless they didn’t want to fight with Bella around, in which case, they failed horribly, because not only is she in the inevitable fight (which we don’t get to see, by the way!) but she is slapped about like the useless doll-person she is. The whole thing is so ham-fistedly handled that it boggles my mind and makes me worry that this will make the average unwashed wannabe novelist snap his fingers and say ‘Ha! Yes! I have a chance’. To be frank, it almost makes me curious enough to see the movie verison, if only to observe how they handle this badly a structured narrative.
Now, I won’t say I didn’t get a LITTLE enjoyment out of the deal somewhere. I thought the fact that Emmet ate motha-fokkin’ GRIZZLIES was hilariously awesome, if absurd to the extreme, and there was occasionally great fun to be had in unintentionally funny passages of over-wrought descriptions (though mostly, they made me moan). I also got a kick out of the bit in which Edward said ‘I love you’ to which Bella replied ‘I know’, which of course I automatically read in Han Solo and Princess Leia’s voices. Plus, it DID have an ending. Took a little effort to get there, but it existed.
TLDR version: It’s not just that I am clearly not the demographic for this book; the main character is weak and senseless, and the book is offensive in the badness of its story structure. What I’m saying is, I personally thought it sucked a boney.
I should also note my baby sister appeared to like it even less than I.
) and Cloud Atlas (David Mitchel). As for Cloud Atlas we were discussing books for a Globalization module he was teaching, my recommendation was Snow Crash (Neil Stephenson) which ended up in the module I'm pleased to say. Cloud Atlas was a bit disappointing in its conclusion for me but overall a well written and envisioned book.
