Editor's Note: Someone is making me watch a movie for teenage girls this weekend. It is a personal rule of mine to read the book before I see a film. My suffering is yours.
Twilight is, in fact, the worst novel ever written.
I want you to imagine your teenage conversations with your various lovers. Recall all of those long, late-night phone conversations with objects of your affection - the distance, the desire, the painful feeling of holding a cheap handset to your ear for hours. Remember that inane, pointless, utterly unjustifiable kind of teenage affection?
Twilight is like being forced to sit on a police wiretap of those conversations until you die of lockjaw. It is, essentially, a supposedly pretty teenage girl and a supposedly pretty teenage boy having one of those, like, conversations? For 500 excruciating pages. The only solace in that grim statistic is that it reads like Stephanie Meyer is an artful beneficiary of a pay-by-the-page salary structure at points with all the soul-destroying dialog. Example:
"I can read everyone's mind but yours."
"I love you."
"I'm a vampire."
"You are beautiful and a vampire and I love you."
"I could kill you, you know."
"You are a beautiful, deadly vampire and I love you."
They do this for approximately 498 of the 500 pages. There's a brief one-liner introducing a conflict that goes on for about 3 unconvincing seconds before it's back to doe-eyed treacle. You know how reading a long book can make your limbs fall asleep because you get engrossed and sit in one place for too long? As Twilight ends you'll think you've done that at first, but it's actually diabetes.
I didn't buy the whole "she's a Mormon and this book sets women back!" stuff at first, but it's dead on. Bella, the main character, is a pathetic waif at every turn. Her perspective as narrator, her character, exists merely as a vehicle to behold the greatness of Edward, the male lead, and bask in his perfection. 497 pages of the treacle are devoted to awestruck descriptions of Edward's perfect physique, smell, car, strength, and devotion. Bella is Maggie Gyllenhall in Secretary with Henry Makow tracts tucked into a smock, politely preparing dinner while waiting for Edward to save her.
Harry Potter was a phenomenon for a lot of the same reasons Twilight is - it crystallizes youthful feelings of difference, insecurity, and desire in a convenient package. But Potter was, at the least, well-written; there are sections of Twilight that should embarrass the editors now that the books have made a lot of people very rich. There is a part, early on, where Meyer feels obligated to discuss an internet search of Vampires replete with pop-up ad squashing and a 56k modem. It's the prose equivalent of an exhausted sigh of relief from literary agents, the kind of passage that practically throws the manuscript in the dustbin for them. And yet here we are, contemplating its place in tween history.
I would argue that Stephanie Meyer is more Jonathan Taylor Thomas than Justin Timberlake. There is no hope for redemption in a hilarious skit years from now - Twilight is earnest, average, and utterly indistinguishable from what has come before it. I look forward to quickly forgetting all about it.
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5 comments:
I've read it, and yes, it is that bad.
OT to the post, but I hope you'll forgive, ADS. What are your thoughts on Gaithner at Treasury? 've read criticism from the left that he's too in the Summers/Rubin mold, and would be bad for labor and too focused on free trade. From the right, I've heard terms like "interventionist" and "taxes would go up." More generally, I've seen people criticize his current role in the Paulson/Bernake/Gaithner troika handling, and mishandling, the current bailout, and concern that he let Lehman fail (though I think that's easy to criticize for in hindsight, when I remember a lot of people squawking about "moral hazard" and no one really seems to have realized the destabilization it would have caused). I also remember at some point, here or on Gawker, you had said you weren't keen on him, that you rather would have Volcker (though the man IS in his 80s, I think has said he doesn't want the job, and isn't universally beloved by any means from the Reagan years). What's your opinion now?
Personally, I think it's a solid choice, but I'm just an English major who reads too many political blogs.
I'll put a post together about Geithner. Let's just say that Wall Street's abject happiness at his selection is a bad sign.
Would never read the book my tastes are far bawdier my sympathies go out to you. I did go see the movie the landscapes were pretty to look at as was the male lead if there was more to it I did not notice.
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