Chapter 2: Open Book

52 pages in...

[note: I don't have my book with me as I'm posting this; I'll go back in later and add page #s where needed.]

Let's start off with some good old-fashioned pessimism this week. Bella opines at the very beginning of this chapter: "The next day was better...and worse." She takes a paragraph to appreciate that it's not raining, and she acknowledges that she's feeling a little more comfortable in her new group of Forks friends, who have all been welcoming to her. After getting all that lukewarm positivity out of the way, she plunges back into mopefest mode, bemoans various things unimportant to the story and also frets about Edward, who doesn't show up to school. She can't shake the "nagging suspicion" that his absence has everything to do with her.

Nothing much really happens for a while. Bella has a conversation with her father over dinner about the Cullens. He spouts glowing praise of them. The rest of the week passes, Edward still a no-show.

In Edward's absence, Bella begins to feel more comfortable in Forks, but her comfort is short-lived when, the next Monday, it snows. The Pretty Bird HATES snow. Her friends instigate a snowball fight and she retreats inside in disgust. (Really? God help me, this girl is such a limp noodle! Why the hell do people even talk to her?)

But then all hell breaks loose. Edward is back, sitting with his fam in the cafeteria, and he's staring at her. STARING AT HER!

For some reason, he no longer seems to hate her. He says "Hello," in a "musical voice," when he sits next to her in Biology, and then they kick some ass at their biology lab, identifying the stages of mitosis together, because Edward is super smart and Bella has done the lab before (I'm supposed to be impressed, but identifying the stages of mitosis isn't exactly rocket science. If they were calculating derivatives or balancing complex chemical equations, maybe then I'd be more convinced).

Bella notices that Edward's eyes have changed color.

Edward is painfully interested in Bella, initiates a conversation, and they eventually get on the subject of why Bella came to Forks in the first place if it has made her miserable. Here's her reason: her mother has just remarried minor league baseball player Phil and was staying at home while Phil traveled, but Bella saw that this was making her mother unhappy, so she "decided it was time to spend some quality time with Charlie." You'd think Bella would appreciate being able to get this of her chest, but Edward's prying only irritates her, and he has a delightfully cheeky, "You're cute when you're maaad!" moment, after which she grimaces at him. This is not so different from the majority of "first-meeting" scenes in a myriad of chick flicks.

When Bella leaves school, she sees Edward in the parking lot as she's backing up, which causes her to almost hit another car. She thinks she sees him laughing at her as she drives away.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Bella continues to be a difficult narrator for me to get behind. Any respect that she had for Mike, the one character she seemed to appreciate (and who clearly has a crush on her), has come to naught. She compares him to a golden retriever, no longer finds his advances flattering, and says she is going to have to "do something about [him]." It's a weird response, since Mike comes off as pretty sincere and he's not described as a hideous loser in the previous chapter. Still, she doesn't even give a reason for wanting to reject him.

Bella also reveals why she has sacrificed her happiness to come to Forks, and whether or not you identify Bella as a "selfless" character, as some fans do, may hinge on how you swallow her reasoning: "I wanted to give my mom some alone time with her new hubby!"

I call bullshit. Here's why.

Bella has barely even thought about her mother since she arrived in Forks, despite claiming that they have a close relationship, and she even gets snotty on pg 34 when her mother sends Bella and email, anxious (understandably) to not hear from her since arriving in Forks. Instead of apologizing, Bella's response is incredibly condescending: "Mom, Calm down. I'm writing right now. Don't do anything rash." (We're clearly supposed to see Bella's mother as not having two neurons to rub together; Bella is meant to be infinitely smarter and more competent than her, though I haven't seen much evidence for this.) So far, Bella has thought only about BELLA'S happiness, and we are suddenly expected to buy this spontaneous burst of altruism on her part.

Well, obviously, some people buy it. I don't doubt that there are many teenage girls and even adult women who have the same thought processes that Bella has. Bella is the girl who tries to pass off a passive aggressive, self-absorbed personality as shyness, and I have both known this person and BEEN this person in my teenage life. But the difference between Bella and me is that I've grown to recognize that behavior as counterproductive, because I understand that there are people in the world other than myself. And for those who might think I'm being too hard on Bella, the problem isn't so much that Bella HAS these qualities, but that EVERYONE IN THE STORY FORGIVES HER FOR THEM. Edward responds to her reason for coming to Forks with painstaking sympathy: "You put on a good show," he says, "but I'm willing to bet that you're suffering more than you let anyone see." Oh, I've seen it, Edward. I've seen it, and it is a festering pile of pessimism and self-pity. I've had to listen to Bella's complaints for 49 pages, and now, to add insult to injury, I have to listen to someone VALIDATE all of those complaints, which really just makes it that much worse.

Ah, but the problem here is that I'm trying to apply logic to a character where logic is pretty irrelevant. So far, Bella has just been whatever Meyer needs her to be at the moment. She needs her to be unhappy in Forks, so she is unhappy without reason. She needs her to be self-sacrificing, so she does so without logic. She needs her to be enthralled with Edward and his family, to be totally turned off by a boy who is not Edward coming onto her, so she just IS, no questions asked. Again, this might be because Bella's not so much a character, but a lens for Edward, and to a reader who hasn't gone into complete brain shut-down, and who doesn't ask questions while reading, everything that is written is the indisputable truth simply because that's what the words say.

Edward, so far, is a "mystery," as I'm sure he's meant to be. Even though I already know he is a vampire (because the back of the book says so), there is something about his presence that is...hm...a little bit tantalizing. I'll discuss that in the What's Working? section.

PLOT DEVELOPMENT: We're fed a great deal of information on each page, maybe about a fourth of which is actually important. The rest is Bella making commentary about mundane events in her day. I'm beginning to think, however, that it's not completely unintentional. Bella thinks and speaks in hyperbole, so to her, EVERYTHING is of equal importance. You NEED to know every event: getting an answer wrong in math class, being force to play volleyball, fixing dinner for her father, reading Wuthering Heights for fun, etc. It's incredibly uninteresting for me, but then again, I do hate volleyball. That much Bella and I can agree on.

One concern I have for the progression of the story is that Bella really doesn't DO much, and when she does do things, they aren't very interesting, like reading, writing emails, cooking, cleaning, etc. All other events in her life are almost explicitly externally created by outside parties, friends, teachers, parents (with the exception of her "decision" to come to Forks, which is hard to buy, as she is passive in all other instances). Even Edward's approach is specifically Edward taking the initiative to talk to her. Really, Bella just sits and responds to him. A character that is so inert is usually the kiss of death for a story, as it drains the plot of causality, which most plots are dependent upon. So far, I'm a little baffled by it.

LANGUAGE: I would bawk at the description Bella provides for Edward on pg 39: "He looked like he was shooting a commercial for hair gel," but honestly, that's probably a comparison that someone Bella's age would make. Even so, the more visceral aspects of Edward's appearance that a teenager WOULD notice continue to be overlooked. He is merely "dazzling" or "flawless," descriptions so vague it's a wonder if Bella is looking at a high school student or the Ghost of Christmas Past. This is more of an invitation for readers to Insert-Dreamboy-Here, which I'm sure they do.

Um...does that mean I can picture Edward as this? Or is that too extreme...

The same language problems persist in this chapter. What's particularly annoying are the dialogue tags. People rarely "say" anything. They always murmur, mumble, mutter, blurt, command, disagree, insist, persist, confide, giggle, intrude, add or hiss it (in this chapter alone!). There's no need to do that, young writers. If you write your dialogue effectively, the reader should know how it's being said without being told.But again, skimming readers most likely ignore dialogue tags, so this may not be an annoyance to them. If I weren't reading the story closely, the same might be for me.

SUBTEXT: There's a moment on pg 32 when Bella considers the Cullens' position as outsiders and comes to believe that "the isolation must be their desire," as they are simply too beautiful to not be able to have whatever they want. Well, I guess this shoots the whole insider v. outsider theme in the foot. If the Cullens are hanging out with one another because they simply consider the people of Forks unworthy to be their friends, they're not having to face any kind of prejudice, and they're not outsiders.

Later on, Bella prepares a meal for her father, sits down and talks about how school has been going. When the Cullen family comes up, she says, "They don't seem to fit in very well at school."

But. But. But that theme...the insider v. outsider theme...it was shot in the foot. Bella herself shot it in the foot. They -- what the -- ?

Oh hell. Regardless of the fact that Bella pretty much admitted that the Cullens hang out only with each other because they choose to, (and there has so far been NO evidence whatsoever of the other students actively ostracizing the Cullens), Charlie gets upset and goes on the following spiel:

"People in this town...Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here...We're lucky to have him -- lucky his wife wanted to live in a small town. He's an asset to the community, and all of those kids are well behaved and polite...that's more than I can say for the children of some folks who lived in this town for generations. And they stick together the way a family should -- camping trips every other weekend...Just because they're newcomers, people have to talk."

Wow. Methinks thou protest too much, Charlie. So basically, the Cullen family is awesome and the people of Forks are bigoted and gossipy. No one brings up that the students at school probably WOULD be asking questions if a bunch of pasty kids sat at the cafeteria not eating, not talking, and staring off blankly in various directions. "What are they, militant anorexics?" would be only the first of many elaborate rumors. Seriously, it's not like the Cullens are being inconspicuous.

What's happening here is that Meyer isn't really paying attention to what she's saying. She's making an attempt to give her story something a little greater than its surface value, but she's not being consistent with it.

MORMON INTERMISSION!

Ah, I didn't want to get into the whole Mormon thing, at least not so early in the book, but those values are already showing through. In Charlie's speech, we see that the Cullens, "stick together the way a family should," as opposed to Bella's own broken family. Dr. Cullen and his wife are worthy of utmost respect while Bella's mother, a flighty divorcee, is worthy of being told off by her sixteen-year-old daughter.

Need I point out also that Bella automatically takes up the apron and the oven mitt, since Charlie isn't a good cook, doing the grocery shopping, cleaning her father's house. When Charlie comes home to find Bella preparing a meal he GOES INTO THE LIVING ROOM TO WATCH TV, and Bella's remark is, "We were both more comfortable that way" (35). Bella, the Complaint Queen, says little more than this about assuming these rather taxing roles. Charlie doesn't even seem surprised to find dinner cooking when he comes home, and he merely asks, "What's for dinner?" rather than thanking Bella for taking the initiative.

Misogynyyy...in the maaaakiiiiiing....

WHAT'S WORKING?: I'd like to add something that I forgot to mention in the previous post, which was that there is something inherently amusing about the idea of Edward "smelling" Bella every time she is around him, which invigorates his vampire instincts and causes him to go stiff and freak out. It's no secret that this is what's happening; the back of the book tells us as much. I also kind of appreciate a reaction to Bella that isn't glowing admiration, even if it's by no fault of her own. I'd like to see more people glare at her with hatred but, of course, Edward's hatred doesn't last long.

There's also something to be said of Bella's passivity in this whole thing, now that I think about it. If I think back to my crush fantasies when I was thirteen, most of them involved being approached by a guy without me having to step outside of my comfort zone or risking anything. I think this is a societal thing. Women are made to think that the best way to go about finding a boy is by waiting for the boy to come to you. And it's of course Edward who comes to Bella, by no action of hers at all. What a delicious idea, simply going about your normal, miserable day and having the beautiful weirdo fall into your lap. And this guy is everything you would like for that person to be: mind-blowingly hot and inexplicably fascinated by all your boring problems, the way you always wished boys would be fascinated by your boring problems.

The thirteen-year-old in me quivers with joy at the thought. But the adult in me groans and rolls her eyes.

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Chapter 3 for next week. It's titled "Phenomenon." I can only hope that the entire chapter is a recap of that shitty John Travolta movie.

Wish me luck,
Jenchilla