[written in 2008, re-posted here]
Bullet-Point Critique:
Narrative is repetitive and confusing and dull.
Author chooses the perspective of a dull teenage girl. Instead of choosing one of the decades-old, teenage, blood-sucking, super-powerful, outcast, undead. This works with Frodo and Harry Potter, bc their characters are developed from ordinary into extraordinary; Bella just stays a dull teenage girl.
First half of book dull, second half a classic thriller (where characters suddenly become duller or smarter as needed for the plot to work out as desired).
The dull Eve references need polishing.
Furthermore, the book is repetitive.
Detailed critique
The book is aimed at teenage girls, so I'm not supposed to like it. The main character is a teenage girl and the material is about growing up and falling in love. So far so good; men know to stay away. But I liked Dawson’s Creek, which is also about teenage girls and boys growing up and falling in love, so I thought I should give this book a chance.
Unfortunately, the author chooses to write the whole book in the first person using that teenage girl narrator! This means that everything you read in the book is from that narrow perspective, and worse, it's a narrator who doesn't tell a story well (obviously it's not the author's problem--we know she can tell a good story bc she's a published author; but the narrator struggles).
Teenage girls should find that Ok, b/c it's similar to them. Women who used to be teenage girls should find that mediocre, but sometimes Ok, b/c they can be nostalgic about their youth. But men will not only be bored, they will be lost.
Or I was anyway. Every other page, the narrator would write a paragraph and the diction would throw me off. I'd re-read and be pretty sure I got what the sentences meant. Or I would read something and think she had introduced a major character twist, only to find the characters acting like it was no big deal. So again, I'd re-read and realize I was probably misinterpreting. It's like reading The Sound and the Fury, where one of the narrators is hard to understand bc he's so erudite, and the other bc he's a retard (forever now to be pronounced ri-TARD, thank you Zach Galifianakis). Bella is neither of these, but she thinks like a teenage girl and narrates with the voice of a confused kindergartener.
So if you're not used to how teenage girls think and write and tell stories, you might be in for a struggle. But I like to struggle with a challenging read, or an unreliable narrator, where you have to figure out what's really happening by ignoring the narrator's opinions and half of the facts, focusing just on the facts that the narrator probably gets right. It's rewarding bc you find nuggets of re-assessing insight and re-vision. So if Bella is just another challenging narrator, why the low star rating? B/c we're just getting started on the troubles with this book.
Bella is not just challenging, she is incompetent. For those of you who don't believe me, here are some examples.
She spends the first 200 pages talking about how she meets Edward, doesn't really meet him, but falls in love anyway, how he stares and glares at her (fifteen times in the first 150 pages--I counted, and in 80% of their early encounters), how she falls in love with the anger, how he smirks at her, and she falls in love with his disdain, how he acts strange (to a clueless girl it's strange; the reader gets it immediately), and she falls in love with the enigma, etc. It's just the spoony way you would expect a teenage girl to go on and on about all the details of how she fell in love. But it's 200 pages worth of details, which is 198 pages more than an average male reader requires, 180 pages more than a good editor shd allow, and 150 pages more than this Dawson's Creek-loving guy cd tolerate.
Bella also doesn’t get that she needs to work hard to communicate to the readers how Edward makes her feel when he dazzles her. It’s not easy to communicate a feeling in words, but good writers manage. But instead of using metaphor or symbol, she keeps adding new words and descriptions, as if we will get it eventually: his eyes “flash” and “penetrate” and are “intense” and “scorching”, they “pierce” and “have devastating power” and “gaze with probing intensity”, as he “glares” and “stares” “intently” (and various other violently-sexy-but-not-sexual looks that any good Mormon would love to be ravished by, while resisting a real ravishing until marriage). Yeah, we get your description, Bella, but we will never get the feeling unless you learn how to communicate things that are difficult to say in words.
Same thing with Edward talking in the cadences of an earlier century. She illustrates this by merely saying that’s what he does, and by including a couple archaisms like “if you wish” for “if you want”. But we never hear Edward this way; we do hear him as teenager who talks like an adult, but not like an adult from last century. So we don't really believe he's talking that way. (Again, this cannot be the fault of an author too lazy or skillless to draft the appropriate language, bc the author has demonstrated the requisite skill by getting published. No, the fault must lie with the narrator.)
Still just getting started. So many problems, trying to pick the most illustrative examples.
Sometimes Bella is unable to even think of new words for her descriptions, and she just uses the exact same word repetitively. See how I overused the word “dull” in my "Summary" above? It’s distracting and boring, right? But worse, it indicates that I’m not putting my full effort into my work, instead just lazily slapping down whatever word first occurs to me, which b/c Bella is a dull teenage girl is the same word as last time. Good storytellers are suspicious of repeating even ordinary words, b/c they’re constantly searching for new ways of saying things to fully communicate their tales in fresh and engaging ways.
Bella, by contrast, in just the first half of her book, has Edward “chuckle” twelve times, “smirk” five times, and “snicker” three. People don't chuckle that often, and I know the real Edward didn't. Edward is a real, complex character, not just one that executes laughs and crooked smiles, stares and glares some more, cocks his head this way and that, wrinkles his brow, until you feel like he’s a windup toy. (Oh, shit, maybe that’s what we find out in the later books: vampires have no free will, or vampires can only use the facial expressions they had discovered by the time they were bitten!)
The positive side of this is that Meyer uses it to give the reader some insight into Bella. Bella says she’s in love with Edward, and it’s clear she believes this. But her repetitive descriptions of him show how little she knows about him aside from smirking and bossing her around and bantering with her. She’s in love the way teenagers are in love, while claiming to be in love the way only an outcast, century-old vampire and an outcast, precocious introverted girl could be. This is the funniest part of the book, b/c even guys remember how silly their early loves were. But girls especially will enjoy re-experiencing that shudder of shame they get when they read their old diaries and think, "Oh, I can't believe I wrote that poem" and spent a whole semester cooing about getting my first kiss from that scrawny high school ugmo.
Guys, Meyer gives you a laugh, too. You'll enjoy how aggressive and condescending Edward is in Bella’s own descriptions, but how Meyer never has her acknowledge this fact. So again Bella thinks she’s in love b/c Edward is a self-controlled, saintly Adonis, while the reader can see that she’s in love b/c he’s desperate for her, b/c he's deadly, and b/c he's intense and brooding and mysterious, and arrogant and aloof. And less importantly b/c he's a self-controlled Adonis. It's pretty funny how sad Bella reveals she is without knowing it, but we all remember that type of girl (we called them "high school girls"), and how we called them all "baby".
Anyway, it’s gradually revealed that Edward is not just a self-controlled, saintly, controlling, aloof, intense Adonis, but also an absolutely perfect being, as well. He is smart, he is witty, he is virtually indestructible, he ignores girls who aren't Bella, he has a perfect body (except no tan), he drives thrillingly yet skillfully fast, he runs even faster, he plays piano, he writes complicated music, he reads people’s thoughts. What, does he have good handwriting, too? Oh yes, yes, he does. Meyer must not realize that sometimes the only reason guy readers will read a love story is if they can put themselves in the position of a guy in the story. But what guy will have the balls to imagine he’s Edward, a perfect creature? And the other guy characters aren't in the book enough to be any fun imagining ourselves into. Most importantly, the elephant in the closet, guys (and girls?) will just flat out hate Edward b/c we’re jealous. So guys check out of this story.
More evidence of Bella being a bad storyteller. She spends 200 pages before discovering he’s a vampire. I'm not calling Bella dense, bc who knows how long it wd take before I actually accepted someone was a vampire, as opposed to joking about it. My problem with the delay is that the reader knows he's a vampire from the book jacket. So we have dramatic irony, where the reader knows something the character doesn't, instead of suspense and mystery. Odd choice in a dark, dramatic tale, to avoid the suspense and mystery and go for dramatic irony. Still, it would be Ok if the dramatic irony were used to good effect, like when good authors make the reader laugh or feel superior to the characters for being in the dark. Except Meyer fails to use the irony to any effect, and the reader is merely impatient for Bella to figure it out, finish with the loopy teenage lust-from-afar, and move on to start the real relationship.
After 200 pages and a dozen chapters, Bella finally does figure it out, and moves on. In the next chapter, we finally get to watch her truly meet Edward and fall in a deeper kind of love, the kind where you talk about everything under the sun and share emotional secrets and fears and dreams and values, and we are all settled in, ready to watch the romance blossom and develop and deepen. Then that chapter ends. And we move on to the monster horror flick screenplay that is the second half of this book. (It’s like Full Metal Jacket, with the two compartmentalized halves, one for character, one for action.)
The action part is fine, bc you don't need anything more than flat main characters. I like that it creeps up on you, like it would in real life, and like vampires would, but not unfairly (Bella lays the groundwork). I had several problems with characters acting unlike themselves to make the plot work, and general plot logic holes. And I continued to get confused by Bella’s language and choice of details. But really I was just so relieved to be on to something interesting that I didn’t look too closely for plausibility.
And the rest was a fast beach read.
I wish this had been written from Alice’s perspective, writing for other vampires outside her coven. Then we could have seen flashes of the future (like any visions of Bella or half-remembered trackers), we could have seen the vampire world from the inside and figured out its rules, we could have heard Edward tell Alice when he read people’s thoughts (like all the classmates, an interesting storytelling device), but we still wouldn’t have known Bella’s thoughts since Edward can’t read her (creating dramatic irony, this time with a purpose), and we could have seen Edward for who he really is, not filtered through Bella's naive seriousness. And the story would have been clear, albeit in a slightly old-fashioned diction. I guess this option is left to the fanfic writers.
Enough things I didn't like. A couple things I liked:
Edward is constantly taken aback by how nonchalant Bella is about his being a vampire. At each new revelation she accepts with open mind, he stares piercingly in disbelief, then frowns, and purses his lips into a tight thin line, and shakes his head in consternation; then a corner of his lips turns up into a half-smile, and finally he busts out with his trademark crooked smile. You won't want to, but if you look closely, he’ll be sure to smirk and chuckle, too.
At first I thought this was bad writing by Meyer, for failing to see that lots and lots of people would react that way, not just Bella. Bella is not that unique or special or interesting. She’s just a typical nonchalant introvert, who can accept strange things. I’m that way and so are tons of my friends. I knew that Bella shouldn’t be able to see how typical she was, she’s clueless; but I thought that Edward should not be so surprised at her nonchalance, since he’s been alive long enough to know that lots of people don’t naturally freak out at things, even dramatic impossible things that are supposed to scare them.
But then I think we’re supposed to see that he has been locked away in his vampire world for so long, and from a time when people were less accepting, that he has developed a classic cloistered us-v.-them attitude. Where he assumes if anyone finds out anything, they’ll try to burn him at the stake. So when Bella doesn't care, it shocks him bc he's so ensconced in the vampires-vs-everyone worldview. So that made sense and worked for me.
Another thing I liked was that Bella experimented with flirting like a total novice, and that was fun to watch (if not exactly an original device in teen love dramas). I also liked that she's not naturally a flirter, or probably isn't the type who would have thought to dazzle people with her flirtatious bad self, but thinks of trying it bc she's copying Edward, after seeing how powerful his dazzling can be. I also liked that we don't know whether she flirted well, only that she got the information she wanted. This is consistent with the fact that Bella is the narrator, and can only tells us what she knows, and she wdn't know if she was being cutely flirtatious or awkwardly so.
I also liked Jacob the character and the hints of disputes with wolves. I know, that supposedly means I shd read the next book where those are developed, and I did watch the second movie, but that's about all I'm in for.
I liked thinking about the epigraph and cover (temptation in the garden of Eden and apple imagery), though no explanation of symbolism or analogy satisfied me.
Is eating the fruit like being bitten by a vampire, so that “surely dying” and knowing good and evil is equivalent to being a vampire? That would make Edward equivalent to Eve, who ate the fruit already, but unlike in that story, he’s refusing to offer the fruit to Adam, by refusing to offer to bite Bella? This would make it an interesting, “what if Eve bit but Adam didn’t” story, which I had never thought of. The trouble with that is that a key fact in the Genesis creation story is that Eve is the first human to bite fruit, whereas there are lots of vampires already.
Or is Bella Eve, offering her alluring scentful self to be bitten? Bella does say at the beginning of the book that Edward doesn’t “know her from Eve”. This could be a clue that she is not distinguishable from Eve, and she’s the one offering the apple on the book cover. And Bella is the first human to mingle with vampires without becoming one, like Eve is the first woman. So then if she’s Eve, then she has eaten the fruit, so accepting the vampire world is equivalent to eating of the fruit? And offering herself to Edward to be bitten is like offering the fruit to Edward, which he does so well in refusing. Except Edward is already part of the vampire world, so he already ate the fruit, so that doesn’t work.
I’m certain this analogy works, b/c otherwise they wouldn’t feature a giant apple and two pale arms and nothing else on the cover. Let me know if you figure it out, b/c I'm sure it's not just a vague allusion intended to raise the general notion of temptation and sensuous biting; no, it has to actually work as a full metaphor or allegory, I just haven't digested it yet, bc otherwise they would have taken the flesh off the apple on the cover and left only an empty core.
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