Category: Books

Stephanie Meyer

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Just like clockwork, after a new Twilight movie or book comes out, there’s a frenzy of Twilight-centric pop culture critiques that spread all over the internet. They mostly focus on these ideas: a) Twilight is a piece of shit, and b) it sends awful messages to the people who read it. What I find interesting is that most of these articles, opinion pieces, and blog posts focus on the relation between the material and the fan base, and don’t spend a whole lot of time on the author, Stephanie Meyer, herself. Personally, I didn’t know anything about her, and it was a shock to me to realize that I had never checked her Wikipedia page.

It was also shocking to me that she’s 36. I don’t know why I thought that she would be older, but I guess that I thought that the only reason that anybody would write books the way that she does is for cynical commercial reasons. Even more, she talks about the books and their inspiration, both literary and personal, as an expression of herself. This made me really uncomfortable. Even though I think it’s awful, I can understand and accept a person who writes vapid novels that are calculated to appeal to the pre- and teen demographic. But to accept Twilight as a work of art created by Stephanie Meyer suggests that the reason that the novels are so clumsy is that she is that unskilled writer, that the themes are so tacky because she is so superficial.

Reading her also made me aware of the parallels between Meyer and J.K. Rowling. Both Twilight and Sorceror’s Stone were their first novels. Both were inspired to write by a vision of their protagonists.

But their differences are telling. Rowling may not be the world’s best writer, but she is nowhere near as bad as Meyer. Even when her technique fails her, her settings are imaginative and her characters authentic. Meyer never shows when she can tell, and (here I’ll cop to not reading the whole series) in the two books I’ve read, not one character interaction has felt plausible as a human (or non-human) intereaction.

The Big Sleep

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I really enjoyed Philip Schultz’ poem in The New Yorker a couple of issues ago. I’m not going to excerpt it here; poetry is right with classical dance as the most vulnerable art form and I would feel bad if I didn’t steer traffic their way.

Part of me just liked the witty turns of phrase, but I also appreciated the courage of a poet writing on the technology that we have come to live with, and the effects of that technology on our soul.

Book: His Majesty's Dragon

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I just got done with Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. I picked it up on Alyssa Rosenberg’s half-recommendation. It seemed like it would hit all of my buttons. I’m an unabashed lover of kitschy dragon fiction, and historical fiction makes me feel intelligent and stokes my ego (when it’s done well, because I understand the references. When it’s done poorly, because I feel superior to the author). A dragon-filled book of military historical fiction? I’m on board!
HMD is set in England during the Napoleonic Wars. We meet Will Laurence, captain in the Royal Navy, as he captures a French frigate with a valuable cargo: a dragon egg. In this alternate history, dragons function as the aerial arm of the military, complete with ground crews and different breeds suited to strafing, bombing and dog (dragon?) -fighting. Will harnesses (imprints) this mysterious dragon, which he names Temraire. This book (the first in a series) deals with the personal fallout of that action, and Will and Temraire’s training regimen in the Dragon Air Corps.
The book is slight, with lean plotting. I found it pretty entertaining and extremely easy to read. I also appreciated that Novik flirted with some of the conventions of the genre, while sidestepping most of them. The mere fact that our protagonist is in his late 20’s means that there is a whole host of adolescent-centric character arcs that we don’t have to read again.
The flip side of that ease and directness of plot is that it frequently feels like it’s underwritten. I don’t believe that longer is always better (although I am slogging through the Baroque Trilogy, so I must be some kind of masochist), but there are several sections that, had they been fleshed out a little more, would have served a more cohesive, satisfying, and substantial whole.
I also found the speculative/alternate history aspect of the book fairly superficial. The characters speak in an unobtrusive old timey formal style (as opposed to, say, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, a novel in which everyone speaks like Joseph in Wuthering Heights), and Novik name-checks a handful of historical figures, but otherwise the characters and plot could have been set in any fictional world. Or Pern.
The most surprising thing to me was how disturbed I was by scenes of dragon aerial combat. The book sets them up as these sentient war beasts, and I couldn’t help but think of war elephants. The scenes aren’t particularly graphic, but the flippant cartoony descriptions almost made it worse for me.
I would probably recommend reading the book if you had it in your hand and were boarding a flight, otherwise I’d skip it. I’m a sucker for multi-volume sci-fi/fantasy stories, yet I don’t think I’ll continue with the series.

It never rains…

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This week has been awful. But at the end of it, I dropped my chemistry class, so maybe the rest of the semester will be less awful. Ironically, although I’ve been busy, I seem to have made it through a suprising amount of media works. There’s nothing that I particularly want to promote, or have the energy to write a full review of, so I’ll just give quick reviews here.

Jeff Lemire – The Complete Essex County

Essex County is a stark story expressed in stark style with stark technique. Interestingly, if I had to pick a single phrase to describe it, it would be “a Canadian 100 Years of Solitude comic book.” I don’t want to discuss the story for fear of spoiling it, but the graphic novel spends a lot of time showing what extended periods of lonlieness and solitude do to people emotionally and relating that to the geography and culture of rural Canada.

All of this is rendered in Lemire’s rough, monochromatic ink style, which perfectly illustrates the empty isolation in which most of his characters live. One powerful sequence shows the seasonal transitions on the farm, and we see that nothing changes, whether it is snow as far as the eye can see, corn rows as far as the eye can see, bare furrows…

Another aspect of the comic that I found interesting was the way in which it resembled Southern Gothic literature. This is not a perfect parallel; there is no Canadian analogue to the Civil War and race relations are much different there, yet as in Faulkner the rural isolation, long history, and buried secrets made me feel like I was missing something in every panel I read. I felt like because I am not from Essex County, I couldn’t really understand what was going on. Fortunately Lemire is humane and exposes those relationships (in a very exciting way, no less).

I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but the story gives plenty to think about and some of the artwork is worth it on its own.

Ned Rorem – The Paris Diary

Ned Rorem was a young, beautiful, gay, American composer who ran around in Parisian expatriate and artistic circles in the mid-1950’s. In short, he was the person that I wish I could be at the time that I wish I could have been. I was surprised to find that he does not talk a whole lot about his work, but there are some personal insights into other composers of the time that I can’t imagine one could find anywhere else, and Rorem’s youthful, neurotic narration is entertaining and provoking in its own right.  I did find the untranslated use of French somewhat annoying (thanks, Babelfish!) and at times I felt like I was intruding into Rorem’s beautiful-people problems (“It’s much harder to maintain one’s reputation for being pretty than for being a talented composer”), but I’m just bitching so that this review doesn’t read as me drooling all over myself.

Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Club Dumas

As I was reading this, I was struck by how similar this book is to Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. Both involve clues embedded in the works of historical writers. Both involve brushes with the occult. But Dante is superior in every way to Dumas. It should be mentioned that Dumas was published a full decade before Pearl’s book, but in this case originality does not trump execution. Skip Dumas, read Dante.

Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver

This is my latest stop on my quest to read all of Stephenson’s works. Honestly, the book is just too long for me to feel comfortable reccomending it to anybody. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good (I do!), but at 900 pages (and don’t forget that it’s the first installment of a trilogy), I don’t want to be responsible for wasting anybody’s time. If you’ve liked anything by him before, you’ll probably like this.

The Big Sleep

It was weird watching this; I’ve seen so many neo-noir and parodies of the Bogart drawl, casual sexism and L.A. cool epitomized in this movie that I felt like I had seen it before. It seems to have scared me off of The Maltese Falcon, however. As one of the few people of my generation that has read quite a few of the classic pulp mystery novels, I can tell you that Bogart fits as Phillip Marlowe, but is completely wrong for Sam Spade.

The Exorcist

Meh. I was high and it wasn’t as scary.