9) I Hate Myself

Book Read: Um, Twilight. Book the first.

Pages: Enough.

Preamble: So you guys know the basic story, right? This is the book that has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like, five years, has made millions of girls cry and do obsessive fan art, and culminated in three sequels and a movie that got terrible reviews but made millions of dollars and broke a box office record in its opening weekend. Damn. I've been curious about this phenomenon for awhile now, stole the book from Bea, and began. I have used images from the film to illustrate my hack plot synopsis, which is as follows:

Girl moves to sunless Washington town, meets strange boy, who, according to the film version, looks like a glam rocker with ridiculous hair:



She spends half the book wondering why he's so weird and superhuman and can crush moving cars with one hand (HE'S JUST NOT LIKE THE OTHER BOYS!) and realizes he's a vampire with agonizing slowness (she meets a werewolf, who tells her this) and then the vampire takes her to a treed area where he shows her that in direct sunlight, contrary to popular misconception, vampires sparkle. Then he explains he's a "vegetarian" vampire, which is a stupid and nonsensical way of saying that he and his family drink the blood of bears instead of humans.

Then (and as I understand it, this is the driving conflict of the entire series) he explains that he craves her blood more than other humans' blood, which makes her love him all the more. Because it's dangerous, see?

And then there's a vampire baseball game.



Then some other vampires show up and everyone almost dies, but then no one dies and Edward and Bella go to the prom. THE END.

Distraction level: The first 40-odd pages of the book took me a few hours. I spent two hours putting it down and getting up to eat crackers, smoke cigarettes, make tea, watch videos of cats sneezing, make tomorrow's peanut butter sandwiches and basically do anything that did not involve me reading any more of this book. The third hour, I threw it at my boyfriend with glazed eyes and shouted in an unfocused manner while he listened politely.

You see, Twilight is not a good book. It is not good at all. It is in fact very, very bad. I am an ardent fan of bad, at times, but it must be followed by the qualifier "good." Bad-good. Craptastic. Some other examples of craptastic work in the florid goth-romance genre include anything by Poppy Z. Brite, or, say, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (the novel AND the movie, natch!). The thing is, I'm not sure whether Twilight (the novel) qualifies as good-bad or just bad-bad.

The Bad-Bad, The Good-Bad, and the Just Shitty: One trait that may qualify the novel as bad-bad are the many, many long passages where Bella dwells on Edward's handsomeness and godlike perfection. There is also many long conversational passages where Bella and Edward talk about how she likes him, how he likes her, and how he wants to drink her blood all the time because it's like "heroin" (that's a direct quote) and how she doesn't care because she loves him so much, over and over and over and oh hell I'll just show you some of my favorites.

In no particular order, these are three of the passages that made me basically stop reading and sent me into a fit of laughter/incredulous coughing sounds.

Page 91: Bella(girl who likes vampire) and Edward (vampire she likes) discuss driving to Seattle over the weekend.

Edward: Well, I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and to be honest, I'm not sure your truck can make it.
Bella: My truck works fine, thank you for your concern.
Edward: But can your truck make it there on one tank of gas?
Bella: I don't see how that is any of your business.
Edward: The wasting of finite resources is everybody's business.

Page 331: Bella and Edward in the midst of one of about 60 conversations about liking each other, or something:

Bella: Well, do you find me attractive, in that way, at all?
Edward: I may not be human. But I am a man.

Page 357: Bella confesses to her father (who up to this point in the novel has shown no discernible personality) that she likes Edward.

"You are going out with Edward Cullen?" he thundered.
Uh oh. "I thought you liked the Cullens."
"He's too old for you," he ranted.
"We're both juniors," I corrected, though he was more right than he dreamed. (BECAUSE HE'S A VAMPIRE GET IT)
"Wait..."He paused. "Which one is Edwin?"
"Edward is the youngest, the one with reddish hair." The beautiful one. The godlike one.

Page 476: After some vampire-related adventure and near-death experiences, Bella explains to Edward for the first of the 600 times that she wants him to turn her into a vampire, too.

He rolled his eyes and set his lips. "Bella, we're not having this discussion anymore. I refuse to damn you to an eternity of night and that's it."

Flowers of Romance? This is the type of writing that is making girls all over North America insane. They are going insane over the character of Edward Cullen---his beauty, his perfection and his raging inner conflict over whether he should like Bella or eat her. As The Guardian astutely observes, Twilight is nothing more than a romance novel packaged cleverly as a young adult book. The bad dialogue, poor character development, cheesy attempts at humor and lingering passages of Bella smelling Edward's breath and Edward breathing on her face all sexy-like remind me of every bodice-ripper I've ever read in the bathtub.

Despite all my sneering, I have to admit this isn't necessarily an awful thing. V.C. Andrews employed the same trick and I loved her novels during my most hormonal years. And the bitch of it all is that Twilight is absorbing---absorbing in an addictive, soul-sucking sort of way. Once I got past my initial horror, I tore through the thing in about three hours. The book weaves a sickening sort of spell that you can't escape even as you curse yourself for ever picking it up in the first place. A reviewer at Pajiba put it aptly:

That’s Twilight. It’s intoxicating. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s intoxicating like convenience-store malt liquor — you get a hangover before you’re even drunk. It’s addictive. Like crack cocaine, only you don’t get to experience the high, you just skip straight ahead to the blackout and wake up in a stranger’s bed with a matchbox car six inches deep into your rectum. But you can’t turn away.

Bella Swan: Empty Vessel: I can understand why teenage girls---and all girls---eat this up. One of the big reasons is that the main character, Bella, is so passive and indistinct that you can literally insert yourself into her body---and thusly into the handsome Edward Cullen's arms. My friend Bea made a good point as she was tearing her way through the beast, saying that Bella is nothing but a vessel for the readers' own unresolved romanticism and adolescent crush tendencies.

That's the one thing Meyer does well: she helps you remember what it was like to be a teenage girl having a crush on the cute boy at school. We were all there. The constant hopefulness that the boy would be in class, pretending not to notice him so he wouldn't notice you, the hours of thought devoted to what is he doing? where is he right now? what is he thinking? and being generally irrational and insane. I remember being there (although my objects of affection were not nearly as cavalier and indestructible as Edward Cullen. Also, at Bella's age I looked like the dorky kid from The Wonder Years in drag, so my crushes were largely unrequited.)

There's been a lot of arguments amongst friends of mine and in various media about Bella's passivity and vaguely nauseating role as the sacrificial lamb here. She loves Edward so much that nothing else matters in her life: not her goals, her dreams, college, anything like that. Her dream is to be with Edward forever. That kind of supplication definitely made me queasy as I read. I also found it compelling.

I have never read a young novel in which a female character was so passive. Most of the authors I read as a young girl (S.E. Hinton, Roald Dahl, Gordon Korman, shit, even Stephen King for Christ's sake) featured women who were strong or vengeful or brilliant or sassy or quirky. Bella is none of these. She is simply a simmering cauldron of love for Edward, who lets him save her over and over again. Others will find this completely objectionable or irrelevant. I'm torn between both of these sentiments. Either way, I would kill someone to get ahold of the next book. And yep, I kind of hate myself for it.

5) With Dream Comfort Memory to Spare: Barbara Gowdy's Helpless

Book Read: Helpless
Author: Barbara Gowdy
Pages: 306

Distraction level: I was reading another book and got disgusted with it so I threw it across the room and picked up this one instead. I began it last night and finished it this morning. It's a thriller (disguised as a Governor General Award contender) so I automatically felt a breathless sort of compulsion to finish it. Unfortunately, I have to go back and deal with the other book now, on the floor in the corner, its pages akimbo, its spine bent.I've also been busy watching videos like this. Over and over and over.

*Yes, I've used "Nabokovian" as a tag in this entry, and yes, I know it makes me sound like a total asshole. There's a reason I'm using it! The next book that I'm finishing (the one I threw across the room) will need this tag too! Oh....Christ. Anyway.

It's hard out there being a pedophile. That's one of the issues Gowdy explores in Helpless, and as distasteful as that notion sounds, she pulls it off. But for her, the world of the displaced outsider is a familiar theme. In an interview at the back of the book, Gowdy says her obsessions are "attachment, the need for humans to attach themselves to other humans, and how helpless we all are before this need." It all sounds sort of vague and broad until you look at Gowdy's body of work. She's written about an insanely dysfunctional Canadian family with a suicidal matriarch (in Fallen Angels, which remains my favorite of all of her books) and a woman who spends her entire life pining after a distracted waify artist-type (The Romantic) Most famously, Gowdy wrote a story about a woman who is quite literally in love with death in her short story We So Seldom Look Upon Love which later formed the basis of the dreamy and surprisingly lovely movie Kissed (otherwise known as "that Canadian movie about necrophilia.")

Basically Gowdy excels at adding depth and humanity to characters who we might otherwise consider repugnant. Helpless is a novel about mothers and daughters, dads and sons, girl children, kidnapping and repressed pedophilia. And, yeah, it all deals with obsession too. At the forefront is the dilemma raging within Ron, a schlubby vaccum cleaner repairman who considers himself a Humbert Humbert-esque "connoisseur of beauty," particularly when it comes to beautiful young girls. He spies the stunning nine-year-old Rachel walking home from school one day and the wall between his "morality" and his desire comes tumbling down. You might see where this is going---Ron eventually ends up taking Rachel to a room in his basement. In the book's creepiest touch, Ron bedecks it with Barbie dolls, Disney DVDs and a dollhouse in an attempt to recreate the childhood scenario that led him to his love of girl children in the first place. Ron attempts to justify his behaviour to his girlfriend (and to us) by rationalizing that Rachel is growing up in an unfit home with a single mother who plays piano at a bar and works at a video store for a living. Through the third-person subjective, Gowdy then lets the story unfold through the eyes of Ron, his girlfriend, Rachel and her long-suffering mother Celia, who has some mommy/daughter issues of her own to grapple with in addition to coping with Rachel's disappearance.

I was really split by Helpless. On one hand, it's compelling because Gowdy constructs a fast-paced and solid narrative. Her characters are well-written and certainly believable in their reactions to the situation---no doubt in part because Gowdy spent months exhaustively researching cases of missing children in Toronto and speaking with members of the police force about their own experiences.

But I can't entirely say I liked it. And it has to do with Gowdy's attempts to humanize a man who is attracted to pre-pubescent girls. (And it's not because I think it's gross, or upsetting - we should be reading novels like these and talking about them. Gowdy knows there's a line that most of her readers don't want crossed---and well, she doesn't. If you want to be truly horrified by an unredeemable child molester, check out the narrator of A.M. Homes' The End of Alice. Or, you know, don't.)

It is fascinating to see the way Gowdy allows Ron to grapple and justify Rachel's captivity using his own skewed rationality. At the same time, he struggles to minimize the harm caused by a situation that has spiralled out of his control. He's not stupid or blinded by his misplaced affections---he knows this won't end well. He's aberrant, but he's not necessarily a monster. In some ways, this makes his character suffer from a dearth of personality---and there's not a lot of subtlety to Gowdy's portrayal of this supposedly conflicted person. And right up to the book's final, not particularly shocking conclusion, we are reminded that Ron, in some ways, is a fatalistic romantic; not through exposition or his actions, but through explicit statements. I could have used more showing and less telling, to use a well-worn phrase spouted by many of my old journalism profs.

Fuck. I feel like I screwed the pooch with this review, to borrow a well-worn phrase from my grandly and gloriously crass man friend. Okay. Helpless is a challenging book that should make a lot of middle-class people of a certain age angry. Gowdy is the type of author who can approach this subject in an intelligent and graceful way, and in some ways, with the research and such, she's succeeded. But I think she's done better work when it comes to constructing characters who baffle the reader, leaving the book shrouded in a sort of lovely mystery that we're not supposed to fully understand. This could have been her swan song, and instead, it's akin to the sound of a goat yelling like a man---initially it's slap-you-in-the-face jarring, then compelling, eventually tedious and ultimately a bit forgettable.