Review: “Twilight,” Stephenie Meyer

An overlong review of Twlight, because I can.

I chose to jump on the Twilight bandwagon partly as an end-of-semester escape. When it really gets down to the wire, all I want to do is something else, and in that respect Twilight is a perfect distraction. I’d been following the noise on Oh No They Didn’t about it for months, and my mom says dozens of people buy it at Borders every night. With the movie recently released, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. The other side of the coin, of course, is that I’m a sucker for vampires. . . . No pun intended.

Now that I’m done with it, I can definitely see the appeal Twilight has. I think every young woman dreams of being consumed by love. In the vampire mythos, this becomes a literal possibility, and Bella and Edward’s romance is a perfect example. Their unreasonable attraction to each other is the ultimate in teenage infatuation: they fall in love like a toddler falling down the stairs. The toddler cries because he can’t imagine the pain ending, and Bella and Edward take leave of their senses because they can’t imagine a time when they will not be desperately in love with each other.

Unfortunately, Meyer falls into the trap of believing that repeating something incessantly is tantamount to proving it, but in fact the endless reiterations of Bella’s obsession and Edward’s misgivings are ultimately more tedious than they are convincing. You just have to accept that theirs is the undying love of ages, without much in the way of evidence — excepting, of course, the weirdly hypersexualized descriptions of how good Edward’s breath smells. The pseudo-orgasmic descriptions of their kisses are clearly meant to stand as some kind of evidence, but this somehow implies that physical attraction is an appropriate litmus test for True Love (in capital letters), when it seems to me that the two phenomena are largely unrelated. There is nothing about either character’s personality that is particularly gripping, though Edward certainly comes out looking better in that respect. I can see why so many Twilight fans hate Bella. The whole story is engineered as a self-insertation fantasy. Despite her token traits like stubbornness and the tendency to fall over, Bella is not really a fully-formed character. Instead, she is an avatar for the reader. Through Bella’s, the reader can be seen for what she truly is, chosen and desired as someone special, someone unique. She gets the chance to experience overwhelming desire without putting herself on the line as she might in real life.

In terms of the plot of the book, it’s abysmal at best. When the book was recommended to me, I was warned that the beginning was kind of slow, but that it picked up towards the end. And it’s true that the action appears, but for my part, I found Edward and Bella’s adolescent attempts to navigate a forbidden romance more engaging than the obligatory plot twists of the last third of the book. The purported conflict of the book smacks of deus-ex interference, as if Meyer realized halfway through that something actually had to happen in the book. The vampire James’ obsession with hunting Bella is so arbitrary that it holds no true terror. Bella’s survival is never in doubt, the reader feels no anxiety that things will not turn out well. The only question is whether she will survive as a human, or as a vampire. But since Bella herself longs for this latter option, not very much is at stake. (Uh, no pun intended . . . again.) In fact, I found myself wishing that Edward would just turn Bella into a vampire so that they could live happily ever after together and be done with it. Again, Edward’s teeth-gnashing resistance to the idea is so arbitrary that it comes to nothing. Vampirism is not presented as much of a sacrifice. Meyer’s vampires are not monsters, they’re more like people with severe allergies. Life may be complicated by the inability to use fabric softener or eat apples, but one can still live a full and engaging life. Hell, the vampires go to high school. It seems to me that immortality should save you from that kind of suffering, not enable you to do it over and over again.

There’s not much to say about Meyer’s prose. It moves the story forward, and there are a few moments of fairly handsome description. Mostly, though, it relies on descriptions of Edward’s chiseled chest and his “liquid topaz eyes,” a truly disturbing image that belongs more in sophomoric fanfiction efforts than in published literature. Twilight relies more than anything on a cinematic approach to storytelling, using the prose to move the story forward, not to enrich the story, relying on iconic images and sound-byte dialog. There are definitely a few movie-trailer ready passages, including my favorite, when Bella expresses disbelief that the Cullen family plays baseball in their spare time, to which Edward slyly replies, “It’s the American pastime.” There are moments of wit, of cleverness, but mostly they are obscured by vague and stereotypical teenage fantasy romance. Not that I expected anything more.

So like said, I can see why Twilight is popular. I enjoyed it, actually, despite my snobbery. It makes me despair that this is the kind of writing you have to do if you want a bestseller, but for what it is, it’s perfectly fine. You can’t compare Twilight to Lolita (though, now that I’ve said that, it occurs to me that it might be a rather salient point, in terms of the unreliable narrator’s total obsession with the object of her/his affection). But the point is, the comparison is neither fair nor productive. I can’t see much of my literary aspirations reflected in the Twlight phenomenon, nor should I try to. What Stephenie Meyer is doing has its place, and she’s presented a fairly competent example of her oeuvre. It’s a fantasy, and as a fantasy, I enjoyed it.

Reading Twilight reminded me of a period several years ago, during which I had a brief acquaintance with another author of young adult vampire novels, Amerlia Atwater-Rhodes. Atwater-Rhodes published her first book in 1999 at age 14, befor YA vampire books were really in vogue. I was thirteen, deep into my Anne Rice obsession and writing a lot of vampire stories that weren’t much more than Anne Rice fanfiction, when I stumbled across a listserv Atwater-Rhodes had established for young authors of vampire fiction. I was never deeply involved in the community, though I did correspond with a few of its members. It was the first taste I’d had of a community of writers. I liked it, loved knowing that there were other people doing what I was doing, who shared my interests and took them seriously. It’s probably fair to say that that experience has informed a lot of my subsequent involvement in fan communities. I only read, I think, the first two or three of her books before my interests changed and I moved on, but Atwater-Rhodes is still publishing, and runs a website, Den of Shadows, with information about her books and her writing life, and what seems to be a fairly active message board. It makes me happy to see a writer so openly and actively engaged with her readers, and it also makes a lot of what I’ve been reading in these book-promotion guides seem real. Good for her, for continuing to do what she loves, and for providing her readers with a welcoming community.