Opening Old Wounds

Some time ago, it occurred to me that failure is vastly more instructive than success.

If I had to teach a creative writing class, I'd assemble some of the worst books I've ever read, and have my class read them, and discuss why they were terrible, terrible stories. After each reading, I'd hand out a writing assignment, with the implication that the students would learn from the mistakes of their recent reading. I don't know for sure, but I have an idea this would turn out some pretty decent writers. Eragon is one of the books I'd have the students read.

Twilight is another.

Since I last posted about the book, somewhere down below, I have mostly finished it (I have about fifty pages to go), and I've seen the movie. But since I know how it ends, and I don't have reasons to expect a miraculous turnaround in the overall quality of the book, I'm going to go ahead and say what I have to say about it now, and hopefully be done with it. I certainly feel finished with the whole thing.

As a story, Twilight is mostly pointless.

The book is 498 pages long. At page 371, the plot kicks in. It occupies literally only the last fourth of the entire book. It's as if somebody read an early draft of the work in progress and reminded the author that she might at some remote point in the narrative have to quit fantasizing about the relationship she (and apparently, a distressingly large number of teenagers) always wanted in high school, and get down to the business of telling an actual story.

Said story might actually have been halfway interesting, too. It has a decent sense of tension, decent pacing, and if I actually cared about any of the characters at all, I could see myself being a bit invested in the whole thing.

Actually, no, I do kind of like the character of Alice. But I can't decide if that's because she is genuinely interesting, or if she only seems so in comparison to the rest of this sorry bunch.

Sadly, this completely decent story comes in as practically an afterthought, tacked on at the end of the author's vicarious self-indulgent wankery.

I was amused by Robert Pattinson, who played Edward Cullen in the movie, when he remarked that reading the book left him feeling embarrassed, because he felt like he was reading the author's private fantasy, something that shouldn't have been written. I was amused because I agreed, and also because he had the admirable brass-balled audacity to say so in a TV interview. His co-star, Kristen Stewart (playing Bella, of course), has had similarly scathing things to say about the book and its related movie, which is more amusing still. I get the feeling that both actors are embarrassed by being associated with the whole thing, and that they want to avoid working on its sequels if at all possible. That they seem willing to try getting themselves fired should tell you all you need to know about how much they dislike it.

Sadly, there are two reasons this book should never have been published. Its being a pseudo-sexual fantasy of the author is only one of them.

The other is just that it's badly written. This, at least, is something that editing might be able to fix (or at least improve somewhat). The author likes to go on and on about how attractive Edward is. Every description of him - every description - is laced with references to his exquisite appearance. He is referred to as looking like a Greek god or (when Meyer is feeling uncharacteristically reserved) a movie star; his appearance is described as perfect, flawless, unparalleled. His flesh is pale as marble, likewise hard and cool to the touch; this is somehow intended to be attractive. His voice is devastatingly seductive, his gaze leveling. His kiss causes Bella's heart to literally stop beating for just a moment.

And we as readers are reminded of these things constantly. Clearly, the author does not trust her readers to remember that Edward is impossibly beautiful for more than ten minutes, because that's how often you'll hear about it if you read slowly.

Don't believe me? Let's play a Twilight drinking game. Take a shot of hard liquor every time Edward (or some aspect of him) is depicted in the fashion described above. If you aren't dead of alcohol poisoning by the halfway point of the book, I want to hear about it.

For those of you who may have read the Wheel of Time, it's similar to when Robert Jordan expounds on the feeling of pure bliss one experiences by channeling the One Power (his world's equivalent of magic), the sense of bewilderment men everywhere feel when dealing with women (which is a phenomenally tired schtick by this point, but still a valid observation with applications in Real Life), or the inexplicable agitation women feel when men are doing their level best in difficult circumstances to be logical and sensible.

The difference is that Jordan indulged in these pet descriptions less than Meyer does. Sure, if you look at the raw amount of these descriptive indulgences, Jordan is probably the world champion, hands down, forever. But then, he spread it over the course of eleven books, each of which is longer than Twilight. In the end, he managed to indulge less frequently. Also, his overall writing style is miles better than Meyer's, which helps to lessen the pain and suffering somewhat.

I might be able to excuse some of the descriptive excesses if they served any decent and worthy purpose. But they don't. This is ostensibly a romance novel, and yet there's no real romance to be witnessed in it. We have Bella Swan, a high school girl and Phoenix native who is moving to the small town of Forks, Washington, while her mother goes to spend some time with her new husband. Bella's father lives in Forks, and so she goes to see him in order to give her mother (who is flightier than some teenagers I've known) some space. But Bella hates Forks with a passion. The place makes her bored, and she yearns to be in the Phoenix sun again. That she is pale as new-fallen snow despite loving the sun-drenched Arizona climate is an odd situation that is never explained.

Despite hating Forks in general, and being bored or irritated by all the people she encounters in it, she finds herself attracted to Edward Cullen, who is described often and at length as being impossibly beautiful.

Edward is a vampire, one of a "family" of seven, who have decided to abstain from feeding on humans, and only drink the blood of animals. They call themselves vegetarians as a kind of joke, though it really isn't even amusing the first time.

Aside from his looks, there really isn't much to Edward. He's cynical (which, being 117 years old, is probably understandable), possessive, domineering, stalker-ish. He frequently acts like he's in on some joke Bella wouldn't understand.

The two are often engaged in unhealthy bouts of self-loathing. Bella believes that she has nothing to offer Edward (and she's right, but that isn't how this book operates), and Edward berates himself for the danger he puts Bella in by choosing to be with her (for which he is justified, but it gets sickeningly over-dramatic after a while).

When pressed to explain their attraction to each other, Bella talks about Edward's beauty and generic aura of mystery. Edward talks about how intoxicating she smells, and how badly she makes him want her blood despite having sworn off drinking from humans. If you're thinking there might be some sexual subtext to this, congratulations, you aren't an idiot. Edward also mentions that while he can read minds, for some reason, reading Bella's mind is impossible. This, of course, serves to cement Bella's status as a special and unique snowflake.

The chemistry between these two human failures is... Well, it's nonexistent, really. But the author is bent on categorizing this as a romance, so that doesn't matter. Edward and Bella get together anyway while Meyer orchestrates things, pretending that genuine chemistry is actually occurring, and hoping that readers will humor her. Considering that this is a New York Times Bestseller, they apparently will.

My sister, who is thirteen, tried to explain to me that perhaps because I wasn't (and never have been) a teenage girl, I wouldn't properly be able to understand the appeal of Twilight. But isn't it the job of the writer to make me understand? Anyway, the excuse that "It's a women's book anyway" doesn't hold any water. I've read four perfectly excellent books by Robin McKinley - The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, Sunshine and Deerskin - and all of them have featured female protagonists. All of them have featured a feminine take on events, or featured distinctly "female" situations - Deerskin in particular. I have enjoyed them all immensely.

And while I've said it before, I think it bears repeating: the people who try to excuse all of the faults I've mentioned do so by saying, "Well, it's just a Young Adult novel, you know." Which doesn't wash, or at least, not with me. "Young Adult" should not be a euphemism for "Low Quality." The Young Adult section at your local bookstore is not a place for cut-rate authors to peddle their ridiculous garbage to teenagers and near-teens who maybe haven't read enough genuinely decent books to know trash when they see it.

The goal for Young Adult books should be to present more adult themes and concepts in such a way that their target audience can understand them. This may imply a certain degree of simplifying without dumbing things down. If that sounds like a difficult line to walk (and it does to me) then that might explain why so many books of simliar quality to Twilight populate the Young Adult shelves. But that explanation is not sufficient excuse for the phenomenon.

Then people tell me that, because it's a Young Adult book, "You shouldn't judge it by the standards you hold other books to." This confuses the hell out of me. What standards should I use to judge Young Adult books? Am I seriously supposed to lower the bar - to consciously excuse poor writing, faulty characterization, flawed plotting - for this particular category of writing? Am I - are we - supposed to willingly encourage these young adults to read books that we hold to a lower standard? Are we then, by extension, supposed to assume that kids are incapable of appreciating a good book when they encounter one?

Or should I simply speak of the book without reference to quality, as a concept, at all? That would certainly make all the ridiculous idiots who tell people not to be so judgmental happy, I guess, although that's another bit of thinking I've never agreed with. I'm a judgmental person. If you can't ever add two and two without coming up with five, I'm going to judge that you're an idiot, and rightly so. Similarly, if you're a writer whose storytelling ability is so lopsided that you suffer from diarrhea of the word processor when it comes to fantasizing about your ideal romantic fantasy, but can only manage to shoehorn an actual plot into the last quarter of your book, I'm going to judge that you're an awful storyteller and a poor writer. By extension, the books you write are liable to be equally abysmal.

By the way, the whole idea of having a specific category of writing for young adults doesn't sit well with me. I tend to think demographics and the idea of "target audiences" don't deserve to have much of an influence in any storytelling medium. Ideally, people would just tell good stories, tell them well, and let the quality speak for itself. Obviously, that's my ideal world, and it's pretty clearly removed from reality. I can wish for that, but I might as well wish for a world where warriors take to the skies astride dragons to do battle against evil empires. I could expect both wishes to be granted in about the same amount of time.

(Just to be clear, here, I'm not talking about that godawful fantasy series by Christopher Paolini. I'm actually talking about the generally fantastic Panzer Dragoon videogames from Sega).

Still, if we must have this whole Young Adult thing, we may as well do it right. Which would, incidentally, be exactly where Twilight fails.

And now that I realize I have reached the point where my entire stance can be reduced to a tired Internet meme, I am forced (partly from embarrassment) to conclude and summarize.

Stephenie Meyer: You're doing it wrong.

Dusk, or something like it.

The problem with Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is that it became an inspiration. I’m not talking about a few books, either, but a whole genre devoted to exposing the ennui of the modern vampire. Because as we all know, eternal life, youth and beauty, and the ability—hell, the (super)natural mandate—to stay up all night, every night, and party is absolutely the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

In all seriousness, it would be perfectly fine if there were only one or two books of that sort. But Ms. Rice herself has made the idea the crux of her career (well, until recently), and there is no shortage of people who think this genre is just about the best thing ever.

True, I’ve been known to indulge in a little bit of this Sympathetic Vampire phenomenon myself. I enjoyed the Interview With the Vampire movie (never read the book), and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is fairly excellent as well.

Then there are the Legacy of Kain games, although those aren’t so much interested in giving you sympathetic characters as they are in giving you characters interesting and cool enough that you don’t care that they are Magnificent Bastards, one and all.

All of this is what’s meant to pass for a preamble of some kind.

I’ve been reading Twilight lately.

Maybe you’ve heard of it? Series of vampire-and-werewolf romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, set (or at least begun) in high school? This couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not at all.

You may well ask why I’m doing this to myself. It’s all part of a Faustian deal I made with my sister, a deal brokered by my girlfriend. I wanted my sister to try reading The Hobbit a year or so ago, when she was twelve. This was about the age I was when it was first recommended to me. I’m twenty-seven now, and she’s thirteen. I loaned The Hobbit to her, and she returned it after about a month, saying it was too long. Then she turns around and reads all the Twilight books. Considering that the first of those is 498 pages long, this seemed a little ridiculous to me. You can argue that The Hobbit is a more difficult book, I guess, and I was (and am) a lot more inclined to read than my sister is, but still. So the agreement suggested by my girlfriend is that I read Twilight and my sister reads The Hobbit.

Now, I’m about 120 pages in, and these are some of my thoughts so far:

Isabella Swan is the main character. She prefers to be called Bella.

I loathe Bella.

She starts off bitching about having to go live in Forks, Washington, which is apparently the ass-end of nowhere. Of course, we’re supposed to understand that, since Bella grew up in warm and sun-drenched Arizona, this exile to Washington is completely unjust. There’s also the minor fact that she doesn’t have very many happy memories of Forks, but that tends to get buried under complaints about the weather (not enough sun, too much rain, too cold), the people (how could anybody possibly want to live here? How can anybody manage to be happy here?) and the overall inconvenience of the place. Apparently, the library is so poorly stocked that the only solution is to go to Seattle, never mind that both Olympia and Tacoma—decent-sized cities—are mentioned as being on the way. No, no, only Seattle will do.

Then there’s the issue of Bella’s complete and total lack of anything vaguely resembling physical coordination.

Bella is unrealistically clumsy. She is seriously concerned about falling over herself wherever she goes, and her frequent and innumerable spills apparently result in injury for herself and others. Now, a good writer (Robin McKinley, maybe) would play this for the occasional laugh, understanding that even a perfectly serious story has room for a reasonable amount of comedy. But no, Stephenie Meyer plays it completely straight. She evidently thinks this makes Bella more endearing to us in some fashion, probably by making her seem more vulnerable. Personally, I’ve never found poor motor skills to be a turn-on, but I’m strange that way. I also hesitate to make such direct connections between vulnerability and desirability, but I don’t want this to devolve into an argument on feminist theory. This is the Internet. I’m sure somebody has already done that by now.

Anyway, Ms. Meyer seriously expects us to believe in a girl who cannot manage anything faster than a brisk walk without tripping and falling at least a couple of times on her way from Point A to Point B. This is part of why she feels she shouldn’t have to participate in P.E. The other part of it is that, back in Arizona (here we go again), two years of P.E. were the only requirement, yet four years of it are required here. Clearly, this is a hideous injustice.

I am very strongly reminded of Sarah, from Labyrinth. “But that’s not faaaiir.” At least that movie had Muppets and a David Bowie soundtrack going for it.

And then there’s Edward Cullen. He starts off being a creep in order to distance himself from Bella, a measure apparently calculated to keep her safe in some way. Then he decides, nah, fuck it. It’s too hard to exercise restraint, so he’s just going to give in and do whatever the hell he wants. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, I guess, except he seems thoroughly convinced that he will be a danger to her. He’s just stopped caring. So, as of about a quarter of the way into the book, he’s a cryptic, self-indulgent bastard masquerading as an aloof and still-cryptic jerk-ass.

And girls like this?

Oh, wait, how could I forget? He’s beautiful. Never mind, then. All is forgiven.

By way of justifying all of the above, my sister tells me that this is a book meant for teenage girls. I suppose that works, so long as you view “writing for the teenage demographic” as a perfectly acceptable excuse for featuring complete assholes with faulty reasoning (who are meant to be likeable and sympathetic) in both of the most important roles. Personally, I’m of the opinion that just because you’re writing books for children or teenagers, you don’t have any less an obligation to tell your story well. But that’s just me. I’m old-fashioned like that.

Will I finish Twilight? Sure. I want my sister to read The Hobbit, but that’s the only reason. The rest of Stephenie Meyer’s “work” can go take a long walk off a short dock for all of me.