Twilight, Chapter 3

Hi kids, and welcome back to your regularly scheduled blogging. Took a holiday break yesterday, but the hangover wore off and I'm ready to blog the hell out of Twilight for your reading pleasure. On second thoughts, drinking might make this thing go down easier. Excuse me a second…

Plot: Bella wakes up, eats breakfast, sees that it snowed overnight. I try to figure out the meteorological implications of the snowstorm, and give up when the words "Mayan Apocalypse" start showing up over and over. Bella drives to school, and is touched that Charlie put snowchains on her truck. Chains? Really? I open Stephenie Meyer's website and try to figure out if she's ever seen snow. In the parking lot, Bella is nearly pancaked by a skidding van. Edward goes supersonic to her side and blocks the van with one hand, never once losing the awesomeness of his coif. I contemplate Newton's laws, which S.M. has clearly never done. Bella is transported to the hospital, and meets Edward's father. Charlie makes angry noises. Edward refuses to tell her how he did it, while making it completely clear that he did something, instead of denying everything like anyone with a brain would logically do.

Rant: I want to love this chapter, so badly. Done right, this is the grade-A solid gold money-in-the-bank  big reveal. This, unfortunately, is pretty much the opposite of doing it right. First, it falls waaaaaay too early in the book. We have no sense of who Edward is as a character, so the idea that he's been hiding something is basically pointless. No emotional investment= me not giving a damn. Second, SM has foreshadowed the Vampirism so awkwardly that it doesn't feel like a surprise. She's been hammering us over the head that Edward is inhuman (beauty-wise mostly), and now goes ahead and tells us he isn't human. Try to contain your astonishment.

Most of all though, I have no clue why Edward would act as he does at the end of the chapter. He sees Bella about to die, and being a fundamentally good person intervenes to save her. Fine. Why not use his own cover story, convince Bella she got clobbered and saw things, and get on with his life? His denial is so hilariously designed to keep Bella interested that he might as well carve "I am not human" into his exquisitely alabaster forehead. I hate idiot plots.

Also, the dialogue all sucks. The mark of great dialogue is that it reveals character without needlessly recapping the plot. See the "Royale with cheese" sequence in Pulp Fiction for a justly famous example. Plus, the absurd fetishizing of physical beauty at the expense of minor details like integrity, honesty, personality, and compassion continues apace. So yeah, that's more than slightly disturbing.