I hate it when critics or bloggery types make assumptions about an author based on their fictional works. Fiction is an act of imagination, and while Stephen King is certainly correct in telling authors to write what they know, usually those experiences are interpreted and re-imagined so much as to be all but unrecognizable. Now, a lot of great books are nevertheless autobiographical, and often not even too subtle about it. My favorite author, James Joyce, enjoyed nothing more than writing about the difficult life of one James Joyce, with different aspects of his personality brilliantly reflected in various characters. This is a fairly common phenomenon, but I'm not going to make the leap to thinking that Stephenie Meyer became intimate with a young man fixated on carotids. I'm starting to wonder, though, about certain aspects of her childhood.
Actually, I started wondering a couple of chapters ago. My thoughts can be summarized thusly; "What the fuck kind of teenagers start planning a beach trip three weeks in advance?" I am 25 years old. Teenage-dom isn't that long ago, and my college years (extended teenager-hood if ever there was), even closer. During that near-decade of boarding school and higher education, about the furthest away I ever planned going to the beach was buying a plane ticket for Cabo three days before Spring Break. Now granted, I was and still am an idiot. So we'll double, and allow a week of planning for the actual smart people. Um. A week. Not three.
The entire beach trip is an instructive moment in this book, because it reads so completely and utterly false. Broad strokes are fine. A bunch of kids get out of town, with no intentions other than a campfire, some hotdogs, good tunes, and perhaps a clandestine-but-everyone-knows makeout session or two in the woods. Sure. Some of the best times of my life have been doing exactly that. Just not like this. The whole long scene reads like Stephenie Meyer sat some teenagers down, took careful notes about what they do on weekends, and tried to write about it in the tamest, most adult-filtered way possible. The whole thing is intellectually removed, academic instead of immediate. And the details are all wrong.
Are a bunch of kids going to hike to tide pools instead of pounding the beers they snuck out of the parental fridge? What kind of teenager drives a suburban? Do the social dynamics make sense here? At all? Just for example….. You have two groups of kids, not knowing each other and somewhat hostile. They meet, and the resulting interaction looks like a fucking board meeting with everyone standing around waiting to be introduced by name. Like, really? Would they all pretend to make friends, or glare at each other for a minute before someone (probably the locals) left?
And then, of course, there's poor Jacob. He seems like a nice kid. Dumb and deluded, but nice. I can only conclude that Bella will eventually want to fuck him, because he's described in fairly positive fashion, with lots of nice descriptors. As a side note; I'm deeply disturbed at the way everyone is boring, ugly, and dumb, or someone Bella does / will want to have sex with. Is there such a thing as a platonic relationship in this world? This is what I meant, a few paragraphs ago, about drawing conclusions regarding Stephenie Meyer's childhood and worldview. The views of relationships, ways of thinking about people and interactions, the twisted social ideology…. These are the writings of someone who had a very sheltered, or just very bad, child / young-adulthood. There's no understanding, no depth, no illumination. The whole book is one of those anatomical drawings of sex we all gagged at in highschool science texts. The mechanics are semi-right, but the fire, the passion, the sweetly chaotic sense of exploration…. All missing.
I came into this project expecting to snark a bunch and get some lulz. I'm honestly stunned and worried by what I've found so far. And from what I hear, it gets much, much worse. Oh boy.
No comments:
Post a Comment