Goodreads Review: Twilight

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, I finally read Twilight.

How can one go into such a book without preconceived notions? I had those in spades before reading Stephenie Meyer’s infamous, and infamously selling, teen romance novel. I’d heard it was Mormon. I’d heard it was poorly written, with little plot or action until the novel’s rushed-feeling final third. I’d heard it was anti-feminist. I’d heard that Bella Swan, the main character, was vapid and irritating.

All that proved to be more-or-less true. But I was surprised to find that there were some things that I hadn’t heard about Twilight, features that proved to be largely positive.

Namely, Meyer does setting, and setting description, exquisitely well. I read on her website that the novel was initially titled Forks; I can see why: the fictionalized-but-existant town makes for a lush and immerssive setting. Gray and green and very, very wet, Forks is a vivid backdrop to our narrator Bella’s depression, which lasts through the bulk of the novel. Meyer’s greatest strengths lie here, as well as in the parallel descriptions of Bella’s drab home and school life. It was in the early pages of Twilight–in their utter sadness and the stark truths they revealed about the lonely lives of many high school girls–that I found myself the most engaged. Though even in these early pages, vampire Edward was often unlikeable (he is, variously, sneering, patronizing, haughty, and a little smarmy), one could almost understand how Bella, a very sad girl leading a very lonely life, would turn to a dangerous-seeming, but still pretty, boy, rather than her more welcoming peers, for affection.

Unfortunately, for all the dark promise of both the setting and the male romantic lead, the novel falls flat when Bella and Edward begin their relationship in earnest. Edward’s danger proves impotent; we know (and not just thanks to spoilers) that he’s never going to pose a real risk to Bella, and the chapters about his sparkling were even sillier than I’d imagined. Bella and Meyer wax some of the most purple prose I’ve ever read, and much of the subtle strengths evident earlier in the novel vanish completely.

And then the vampires play baseball, and the novel takes an excruciatingly cheesy turn. Beginning with the America’s-pastime passage, and proceeding through the novel’s, yes, rushed final arc and goofy conclusion (the prom? really?) I couldn’t help but wonder, several times, why I was reading this. There’s a very uncomfortable juxtaposition here between Meyer’s hope for a wholesome relationship between Bella and Edward and everything we’d learned about their characters up until then. Perhaps this is true to the desires of her young readers: rarely do even the saddest teenagers want their mates to be truly dangerous. But these toothless and bland vampires make for some toothless and bland reading, much less romance. Meyer would have done better if she’d kept Twilight dark–and kept the Cullens out of the outfield.

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More Stuff Phoebe Likes

Reminder: I am not a Buddhist. I like stuff. These are some things I’ve been enjoying lately:

• CB I Hate Perfume – I don’t hate perfume. Actually, I love perfume. But I bought a bevy of sample sizes of CB I Hate Perfume’s scents about a month ago, and they’re amazing, more experiental and delicate than most scents. I have In the Library (musty, reminds me of a cabin in the woods), Wild Hunt (which smells like a forest), Winter 1972 (pretty, faint, wintery in an intangible sort of way), and M#3 November (like Winter 1972 but sweeter, with an underscoring of brown sugar), as well as single note accords in Old Leather (amazing, masculine, sexy) and Soaked Earth (exactly what it sounds like–there was a smudge of some on my scarf and I wondered why it smelled dirty). I’d love to try more of these–maybe gingerbread? Or musk? The only problem with them is that they’re faint and fade quickly. But they smell so rich–I bought them while I was working on NaNoWriMo, and I can tell you that the library of my fictional school, Sacred Grove, smells just like In the Library. Just like it! Love it.
• Scribblenauts – I’m fairly unabashed about the fact that I’m a casual gamer. The last time-sink game I played was Shenmue back in 2000. I get frustrated when games demand my time–which is why I gave up on Animal Crossing and Nintendogs. I want games to be engrossing on their own terms, but not demanding; I also like them to be creative. Scribblenauts is great–a treat to play, though the controls can be a bit fiddly. There’s nothing better than conjuring up God and Satan and letting them duel it out. Except maybe conjuring up Cthulhu.
• PlayOn Digital Media Server – We don’t pay for cable. But I love TV, and we do have a NetFlix subscription and a Wii. I spent $20 to get the beta version of PlayOn for Wii and now can stream NetFlix and Hulu and even YouTube to my television. When I was sick last week, I spent all day watching Family Ties reruns. Awesome!

Goodreads Review: The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the first chapter of The Magicians, our hero Quentin Coldwater, a charming, intelligent, rich, but perpetually unhappy young man, muses about the nature of Fillory, a fictional world and book series which form the backbone of Lev Grossman’s novel:

It was almost like the Fillory books–especially the first one, The World in the Walls–were about reading itself. When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slips through into Fillory [. . .], it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better. [. . .] In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn’t in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

The Magicians is, then, the story of a quest for happiness, like much of the escapist fantasy literature it recalls–but if the tone of this quote suggests, for you, that this is an impossible quest, then you’re right.

Quentin, the only American-sounding character in a book full of people who seem to speak with strange British lilts, is eighteen-years-old and bound for the Ivy Leagues. A strange encounter with a dead body changes his plans, however, and he ends up at Brakebills, a magical school nested in a pocket universe (where time runs two months behind the rest of the world) on Long Island. Though he’s cast in a Harry Potter role, as our star student and hero, he’s written much closer to a Donna Tartt character than he is one of J. K. Rowling’s. Blessed and brilliant, but also moody and insatiable, Quentin is often an unlikeable character. His behavior is at times off-putting; his reactions to others sour and unkind. But Grossman is wise enough not to ask us to cheer for him even when we are meant to empathize with him. This is, after all, a novel about misery and the search for unobtainable happiness–how strange it would be if our characters were happy!

Many reviews of The Magicians have centered on the novel’s first book; it’s often described wholesale as “Harry Potter with sex and booze”, but I found that viewing this section of the novel in only this light was limiting. Brakebills is an incredibly rich setting, and the most stunning examples of scene building and magic happen here. There is an absolutely stunning scene near the novel’s beginning featuring a magical feat that seems to owe quite a bit to the magic of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell–in fact, even the magic at the novel’s climax doesn’t quite live up to this display. There’s also one scene of true, and shudder-inducing terror. These sections were deliciously written, and much, much better than those about Grossman’s half-hearted Quidditch-rip-off (sorry, “welters”), for all their tongue-in-cheek similarities to Rowling.

Almost two hundred pages remain after Quentin leaves Brakebills. He departs for strange lands–Brooklyn, then Fillory itself. The narrative here takes on a tone that’s really crushing, appropriate for the empty and desperate lives that Quentin and his friends lead. I was surprised that the one bright spot I found in the story was Penny, a character who had previously been introduced as a foil and rival to Quentin. Even through to the novel’s climax, Quentin seems to view him this way, but I was never really sure if Grossman intended the readers to see him as such. Despite unfortunate fashion choices, he’s clearly the most dedicated magician of the bunch, and possesses an enthusiasm and naivety which is frankly refreshing after spending so much time with Quentin and his dry, dour, and amoral friends. And it is Penny, in the end, not Quentin, who makes the greater sacrifice. Perhaps Grossman was trying to tell us something about hope, and about potential: the most brilliant among us are often those who are, in the end, the most truly lost.

These are the questions that I found engaging in The Magicians–how can we still be hopeful, despite what we know of the world? Is there room for the magic of our childhood? Though it’s easy to focus on the intentional similarities between this and other works–and there’s plenty to focus on, if you want, with references that go far beyond the Pevensies and the Potters–it’s simply not as interesting as taking a close look at what this literature stands for here, and in the lives of young readers like our hero once was: hope and happiness, the kind that’s not always easy to find in grown-up books or in a grown-up world.

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