Twilight, 20

In which…. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Welcome back to Twilight, kids.

Plot: The title of this section is a misnomer. Flat-out lie, really. The chapter has no plot. It exists only through the sheer grandeur of its pointlessness. Your blogger, however, has created a pattern for these reviews and feels obligated to enliven things through relentless mockery. So…
Bella wakes up. In a hotel in Phoenix. The vampires order food and wait for things to happen. Things do not happen. Bella tries to remember how she got to the hotel. Your blogger tries to remember what evil spirit posessed him to suffer this parade of inanity. Bella hangs out with the vampires. Jasper, who you may recall keeping his distance from Bella out of fear that he might go all feeding-frenzy, has no difficulty sharing a couch with her. Because, obviously, one should never let things like logic and continuity get in the way of a shitty story. Alice explains that the other suckheads are in no danger from Tracker and Mrs. Tracker. Why, your blogger is forced to wonder, do the Cullens not roll with Emmett's excellent suggestion of terminating the baddies post-haste? Because, Stephenie Meyer answers, doing so would alleviate the need for Alice's FORESHADOWING vision of a ballet studio, which will most definitively not come back to haunt our heroine in the forty remaining pages. Oh, and Edward calls to spit love at Bella. And Bella leaves a phone-message for her Mom. Finis.

Rant: Oh sweet mother of God that was painful. There is no reason, none whatsoever, for this chapter to exist. It would fit nicely as two paragraphs at the end of the preceding chapter or start of the following, but stretched out to fill pages it is, as the great Roger Ebert once said "an awful experience of interminable length." Alright, I suppose its time I tried to intellectually engage with the material…

Seeing the future sucks as a plot device. Strong plots are always surprising, but in a way that builds on and informs the story that came before. As much as we enjoy the futile excercise of splitting fiction into "genres," the truth is that all great novels are mysteries. The reader is engaged, always, with the question of what happens next. The need to answer this question, and the tension created in its repeated asking, is what kept my younger self up nights, stuffing a towel under the door so my parents couldn't see the light and turning pages with trembling fingers. Stephenie Meyer, who has no faith in her audience's posession of functional frontal lobes, would prefer that we know every event fifty pages in advance, just to emphasize its importance and make sure we are on the lookout. So what if it destroys anything resembling dramatic tension?

And yes, folks, Bella is going to end up in the ballet studio with the evil vampire. But wait! Could it be??? Could this be where the prologue dumps into the narrative???? My God, such genius in the work of Stephenie Meyer. Such generosity. Nobody would ever think, of course, that a book about a girl falling in love with a vampire might, just might, climax with her being threatened by another vampire. So Stephenie Meyer went ahead and told us, right there at the beginning where it could be made big and obvious. Because plot twists arising organically from the interaction of character and circumstance completely suck and should be avoided at all costs.

All quibbles aside, I'm happy to report that there is one genuinely great passage in the chapter: Alice getting to infantilize Bella. I was worried, since Bella had exhibited something like an independent personality in the previous chapters, and she's a weak little girl with hormones and stuff who can't hold herself together without the comfort of her mind-controlling vampire babysitters. It really would be awful, wouldn't it, if fear for her life made her upset, thereby activating the fight-or-flight response that has been fundamentally responsible for much of human ingenuity and evolution over the past few millenia. I mean, girls aren't allowed to make desicions without guys around to tell them what they should be feeling in any given situation, are they? At least Jasper is there to keep her emotional responses in line. Wonderful guy, that Jasper.

Fuck this book and the Mercedes it rode in on.