Preface & Chapter 1: First Sight

28 pages in...

There are three things I notice right off the bat about Twilight.

1) It’s big. It’s a big, fat, 400+ page book.

2) The publishers used something like a 16 pt Gigantic Palatino Linotype font, which makes the length seem less daunting once you crack this big, fat book open.

3) It’s got a really pretty cover. I would say this has no bearing on the quality of the story, but fans on Amazon.com sometimes list the pretty cover as one of the reasons they like the book. They generally include this point at the end of their review as a kind of afterthought.

AND in case you forget about the cover, Meyer has included Genesis 2:17 as her prefatory quote, in which God commands humans not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to remind you about the whole forbidden fruit motif. Because there's an apple on the cover, ya'll. Get it?

Thankfully, Meyer launches headlong into the preface. An unnamed narrator sits helplessly as someone, he’s referred to only as “the hunter,” “saunter[s] forward to kill [her].” There isn’t much explanation about the situation and I won’t spend too much time speculating, as this is clearly the literary equivalent of a teaser trailer. The sauntering hunter is completely off the radar by the next page when we’re suddenly riding through Phoenix, AZ with our narrator, Bella Swan. She’s describing the weather and what she is wearing and after she has gotten this across to us, she explains the harrowing situation she has found herself in, which doesn’t have anything to do with people who saunter.

Bella’s “loving, erratic, harebrained mother” mother is driving her to the airport so that she can get on a plane to Forks, WA, the rainiest place in the country, and live with her dad Charlie for a while. In Bella’s own words, she is “exiling herself,” sacrificing her happiness for the sake of… something—it’s not really made clear—for an indefinite amount of time—that’s not made clear either—an action that she takes “with great horror,” because she “detests” Forks.

She doesn’t show very much fondness for her Chief of Police father either, who shows picks her up from the airport, awkwardly trying to win his estranged daughter’s affection by calling her “Bells” (which I found endearing), and telling her he’s bought her a gigantic 1960s model truck, even though she was planning on buying a car herself. He got the truck cheap from his old friend Billy Black, who’s now in a wheelchair. Bella provides no response to the information about the wheelchair. She doesn’t even think a response to it, which is odd, because she thinks responses about everything. EVERYTHING.

As it turns out, Bella inexplicably loves the truck when she sees it parked in front of the house. 8 pgs in, it is the first time that she has expressed a positive opinion about anything she’s seen, as she continues to be negative about pretty much everything else: the weather, the local foliage, her father, herself, her new room, the bathroom arrangement, pictures of herself that she sees hanging in her father’s house, the people of Forks, and the idea of school the next day, which she knows will go poorly, because she doesn’t believe she relates well to people her age, or, in her own words, “to people, period.” She cries herself to sleep.

At school the next day, Bella is still unhappy. She has few things nice to say about the students and teachers she meets and seems paranoid about their interest in her. Still, people are astonishingly friendly; a boy named Eric comes onto her in English. Bella talks about how she doesn’t care to remember anybody’s name and feels uncomfortable being forced to have conversations with strangers. Nothing particularly memorable happens until lunch time when—OH MAH GAWD! Pretty people-gasm!

“There were five of them. They weren’t talking, and they weren’t eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them.”

BUT WHY WOULD THEY HAVE FOOD AND NOT BE EATING IT!! ARE THEY VAMPIRES?!?

Yeah. It’s the Cullen family sitting in the cafeteria. Meyer takes six very LARGE paragraphs to describe them. Let me sum it up for you: THEY ARE ALL GOOD-LOOKING! They don’t do anything until the smallest girl in the group gets up and dumps an uneaten apple and an unopened soda into the trash can. (Waste not, want not, bitches!)

Bella finds out who the Cullens are, a foster conglomerate of the rich Dr. Cullen, from the girl sitting next to her, whose name she has forgotten (and we know this girl is not worthy of being remembered because she giggles at things). Dr. Cullen adopts kids for funzies, and apparently likes to play matchmaker too, as the whole group (except for EDWARDIKINS!!) is dating itself. Bella then proceeds to watch Edward stare in various directions.

Bella is intrigued by what she sees in the cafeteria. Then in biology, she of course finds herself sitting next to Edward, who turns rigid, leans away from her, looks at her with hatred, and acts as though she smells bad. Bella gets very angry about this. “It couldn’t have anything to do with me,” she huffs. “He didn’t know me from Eve.” After class, Edward shoots out of the classroom as though his butt is on fire and Bella encounters Mike, who asks her if she stabbed Edward with a pencil, as his behavior was unusual. (Mike yet another boy who comes onto Bella; “If I were lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you,” he says.) Bella seems briefly appreciative of Mike, but her mind is on Edward, who she later encounters in the office, trying to change his schedule to get out of biology. He fails (because there wouldn’t be a story otherwise), storms out, and Bella is left to slog out to her truck, fighting back tears.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Christ. Young writers, do I really need to go into the problems there are with essentially naming your protagonist “Pretty Bird”? Don’t do that.

I’ve heard about Bella’s annoyingness from anti-fans, even from legitimate fans of the series. Bella starts off in full martyr mode, suffering for some unseen reason, and then she proceeds to endlessly complain about and dramatize her situation, making me question the sincerity of her self-categorized “altruistic” behavior. Bella has a mental response every other sentence, and her responses are mostly negative and self absorbed. (Honestly, I think I could count all of her positive thoughts from this chapter on one hand.) Here are just of fraction of her philosophical gems:

"When I landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. I didn’t see it as an omen—just unavoidable. I’d already said my goodbyes to the sun.” (p 5)

“I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.” [referring to fishing trips she used to take with her father, TEH HORROR] (p 6)

“It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape.” (p 9)

“[Charlie] wished me good luck at school. I thanked him, knowing his hope was wasted. Good luck tended to avoid me.” (p 11)

Occasionally, she does seem to hit the nail on the head without seeming too mopey. This statement about her social abilities actually resonated with me. It would have resonated more had I not had to slog through ten pages of self pity to get to it:

“Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain.” (p 11)

The story seems to be asking me to see Bella as selfless, or at least as a mature, self-sufficient person who makes very adept judgments of people and yet still has some relatable social anxiety. But she’s not coming across that way. She’s full of contradictions. Her cold attitude toward others just seems plain nasty; it’s exacerbated by the fact that she herself is concerned about being judged or ostracized by the people of Forks without acknowledging her own snide attitude. I mean, to an outside observer, Bella has trouble fitting in, not because she’s awkward or anxious, but because she has a huge superiority complex. No one at Forks has yet noticed her aloofness, obviously.

Everyone else we’ve encountered aside from Bella and the taciturn Cullens are cardboard cutouts meant specifically to absorb Bella’s mental barbs. Charlie is by far the most intriguing character here. Bella remarks at one point that he clearly never got over her mother, and yet she doesn’t seem nearly so interested in his life as I am. Shame.

PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This book, despite its popularity, is incredibly slow. We could have met Edward on page 3 and nothing would have been lost. This chapter refuses to move in any way but a linear one, with no real attention to time, and no sense of priorities. We get to know every small detail of Bella’s life from the time she says goodbye to her mother to the end of her first day of school in Forks. We observe her loading her bags into her father’s car, we observe her eating breakfast, parking her truck in the school parking lot, attending each of her classes, moving from one school building to another, and by the time we get to the scene with the Cullens in the cafeteria I’m thinking, We really didn’t need to know any of that shit to be here.

This chapter should have been fifteen pages shorter.

LANGAUGE: Meyer misuses words. I’d heard that she did. She does. On pg 5, Bella talks about how awkward it’s going to be with Charlie: “Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose…” At first I was like, “Verbose…speaking pompously?” Then I realized that Meyer must think that “verbose” means “talkative,” which it doesn’t. A more appropriate use would be, “When you try to show off lot of unnecessary SAT words in your writing, you make your prose sound VERBOSE.”

On top of this annoyance, Bella slips in and out of talking like a 43-year-old tax attorney, and some of the writing is just plain sloppy and unnecessary.

“Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black “3” was painted on a white square on the east corner [really? A large black “3” as opposed to a small white”3”? I’m glad you’re telling me this. I was curious about the “3” painted on the side of building three]. I felt my breathing gradually creeping toward hyperventilation [say that phrase five times fast] as I approached the door. I tried holding my breath as I followed two unisex raincoats [the amazing floating raincoats of the Olympian Peninsula!] through the door.” (15)

I could do this through the whole book. But no…no, I won’t. Still, despite the language misuses, this prose is easy to read (One of the defenses I’ve heard of this book is that it is very “skimmable”). I always know what Meyer is TRYING to say, even if she’s not saying it in the most effective way.

SUBTEXT: With the quote from Genesis, Meyer’s clearly trying to tap into the idea of Edward Cullen being forbidden fruit (oh, he's fruit all right, sparkly fruit), and Bella being Eve (she even refers to Eve in this chapter). Or maybe he’s the serpent, and sex is the fruit, or becoming a vampire is the fruit. Shit. It’s gonna be a bitch trying to apply analytical logic to this tripe.

There’s this insider v. outsider theme also. Bella sees herself as an outsider. She identifies with the Cullen family immediately because she sees them as outsiders also. Even though there haven't been any real examples of ostracization to back up this theme, I'm going to keep my eye on it. In case something "develops."

WHAT’S WORKING? Despite Bella’s insipidness, I see elements of my thirteen-year-old self in her. This was a desire to be accepted by everyone, coupled with the belief that you are in some way better than everyone. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to feel this way, not even young teenagers, and yet, I can see why it’s attractive. Bella’s an every-teen-girl. She says things that teenagers and young adults think all the time, and to read about a supposedly intelligent girl like Bella having the same thoughts could be seen as a kind of validation. “I feel like I’m being made to feel happy all the time. I can’t interact with people very well. I wish they’d all just stop staring at me and leave me alone.”

Of course, I’m an adult, so I see many of Bella’s complaints as whiney and illegitimate. I see Bella’s qualities as relatable, but they’re still not positive qualities. Even so, Twilight fans have argued that Bella’s not even the star of this series; the Edward Cullen is. Bella’s not so much a character as she is a lens through which to see Edward and his family. Bella is anybody. Bella is you.

Here’s something to back up that theory. There’s an interesting moment when Bella first sees the Cullen ilk in the cafeteria. Meyers describes each Cullen individually (though a Meyer description of a person generally includes hair-color and, if you’re lucky, a brief reference to whether or not the character is lankly, muscular, slender, or statuesque). Then we get a description of them as a group. They’re all pale, with “purplish, bruise-like shadows” under their eyes, and “straight, perfect, angular” features. Then:

"I stared because their faces, so different , so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful—maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.”

Right, so the Cullens are beautiful. What do they look like? Well, they look like airbrushed celebrities in a magazine. No wait, or do they look like angels painted by an “old master"? Hm. But they’ve also got pallid skin and these bruises under their eyes, so do they look like this maybe? When I first read this, I was confused, but that was because I didn’t realize the POSSIBILITIES. You see, nothing has really been described here. These descriptions are devices by which readers can insert the beautiful-people-of-their-choice according to their own tastes. It’s actually pretty brilliant. I mean, if you wanted Edward Cullen to look like this, just change his hair and eye color, give him the skin tone of Casper, and huzzah! You’ve got your dream-boooiiiii!!

Seriously. That maybe one of the reasons why Edward Cullen is described as being the hottest thing ever. If the physical descriptions are all as generic as this, it would be easy to put anyone’s face on Edward’s rock hard vampire bod.

We’ll see how the story develops and whether or not my theory pans out.

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This was my first round. I don’t think future posts will be as long as this. I think my head is making a funny ringing sound.

Here I come, Chapter 2!

-Jenchilla