BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 27: Don't Think Twice, It's Twilight

Last time, Edward shared with Bella his vision for their future: she would get old and gross and decrepit while he stayed young and hot, and they would live happily for seventy years or so until Bella died and Edward committed suicide. Thusly, Bella's precious soul could pass on to Jesus untarnished by vampiredom. Great plan, right?

Naturally, Bella utilized the power of democracy to shut that down, going to the Cullen family who voted in near-unanimous opposition to Edward. At which point the supposedly appealing Edward stormed out in a rage and smashed something in his living room. Of course, this guy came of age at a time when fascists ruled most of Europe, so it's hard to blame him for picking up a few bad ideas. I'm just kidding, we should blame him as much as we can. What an asshole! Previous entries can be found in the sidebar.

Chapter 24: Vote (cont'd):

Bella, admirably calm like she's taking lessons from Oksana Grigorieva or something, turns to Alice and asks where she wants to bite her and get this vampire-transformation started. Alice looks a little shocked that Bella is being so forward, and Edward bursts back in ready to cut a bitch. Someone get the tape recorder! This turned into a Mexican Standoff really fast, but I guess that's the thing about Mexican Standoffs. They're never planned.

Alice says she doesn't think she's ready to vamp Bella – she wouldn't be able to resist the urge to eat her (you're welcome). Bella doesn't back down and tells her to try anyway. Edward starts snarling, Alice cowers. Don't you threaten Alice! Where is Jasper? Then Edward literally grabs Bella's face and hold her mouth closed. Oy, gevalt! (Is anyone still Team Edward at this point?) Bella turns to Carlisle, who is like “I'll vamp you no problem.” Unfortunately Edward points out that if she never comes home to Charlie, her father's present state of post-Italy trip rage will probably lead to a showdown with ATF at the Cullen compound. Dammit Edward, that's a good point! Everyone backs down. Edward manages to get Carlisle to agree to hold off until after graduation to allow for a more organic break from Charlie, and the idea of abandoning her father gets Bella thinking twice. Ugh, don't think twice, Bella! This is going to take fucking forever, isn't it? I'm sick of waiting all ready.

Instead, Bella and Edward go back to her bedroom, and Edward gets nice again. Like comically, 1930s rom-com nice. He literally asks Bella what she wants more than anything in the world. She says him.

He shook his head impatiently. “Something you don't already have.”
I wasn't sure where he was trying to lead me.

Miraculously though, she lands on what he was getting at on her next wish: to have Edward be the one who changes her. Why so sentimental, Bella? A vampire is a vampire is a vampire. It's not like we're dealing with weird maker/makee relationships like in True Blood; the Twilight vampire myth is unadorned with such messy complications. That would be too interesting. Edward tries to use Bella's desire as a bargaining chip, asking if she'd give him a few years in exchange for his services as a biter. So much for a principled stance in defense of Bella's soul, huh? That conviction evaporated pretty fast. Unless Edward is just stalling, which I would not put past him.

Edward wants five years, Bella will only agree to one. Don't even concede that much, Bella! But Edward drops the time angle and then drops a real bomb on us.

“If you want me to be the one – then you'll just have to meet one condition.”
“Condition?” My voice went flat. “What condition?”
His eyes were cautious – he spoke slowly. “Marry me first.”

Whaaaaaat. Bella thinks he's joking, which is an understandable response. They are talking about becoming immortal vampires, after all; where we're going, we don't need marriage certificates! Edward really needs to bring the state of Washington in on this (paranormal!) relationship? Is that even possible? I'm saying, does Edward have a birth certificate? Our man is serious, though. “I'm nearly a hundred and ten,” he says. “It's time I settled down.” Ha ha ha, Edward. Also: GROSS. I'll give him this bon mot without reservation though:

“Look, marriage isn't exactly high on my list of priorities, you know? It was sort of the kiss of death for Renee and Charlie.”
“Interesting choice of words.”

Ya burnt, Bella! This whole situation is a little (a lot) ridiculous; like most of the scenarios in New Moon, nobody looks very good. Bella's thinking guiltily about Renee and her ardent disbelief in young marriage, but our narrator is about to sever ties with her mortal life completely; conceivably when she becomes a vampire she won't have any contact with Renee (or Charlie) anyway. She would never have to know about the marriage! The idea of getting married just fundamentally weirds Bella out. Well, she should get over it. You love Edward and want to be with him forever, right Bella? The fact that she's worried What Would The Community Think or something is bogus (and a little out of step with her character!). On the other hand, this is such a weird procedural requirement coming from Edward, for whom the question of monogamy and loyalty is without question. They are in a committed relationship and don't plan on adhering to normal human social standards in any other regard. What more do you need? This, apparently. Bella tries to go back and bargain off a few years, but Edward sticks to his guns. The argument gets heated enough to wake Charlie (should we be worried that the most charged exchanges between these two are always arguments?), and Edward hides.

Bella and Charlie haven't talked yet, and Bella realizes she forgot to ask Alice for a cover story for the Italian Job. He starts asking what happened, and she blurts out an obscured version of the truth, explaining that Alice told Rosalie that Bella jumped off a cliff, and word got to Edward that it was a suicide attempt, and she had to go to LA (where the Cullens allegedly were) to explain in person, and gradually Charlie looks more and more like he's going to have a heart attack. His face gets more descriptive phrases (“frozen,” “hot with fury,” “flushed”) in a page than Jacob's face got in most previous chapters. “He was no younger than Harry...” Bella says, suddenly concerned she's going to kill her father. This seems like a weird time to make Harry's death into a punchline, huh? Charlie tells her to stay away from Edward Cullen or he'll kick her out of the house.

“Fine,” I said curtly.
Charlie rocked back into his heels. “Oh.” He scrambled for a second, exhaling loudly in surprise. “I thought you were going to be difficult.”
“I am.” I stared straight into his eyes. “I meant, 'Fine, I'll move out.'”

Where is Bella getting all of this chutzpah all of a sudden? I'm not complaining, but what happened to “constant verge of a nervous breakdown” Bella? (I almost wrote “Barbie” just then. Wouldn't Constant Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown Barbie be kind of an awesome toy?) I realize that the last time Bella really argued forcefully like this was the last few pages of Twilight, and that realization in turn makes me realize that the exact same argument over Bella's mortality was happening back then, five hundred and sixty pages ago. Give or take a marriage proposal, nothing has really changed at all. This whole book was just a wheel spinning in place.

Anyway, Bella's threat is enough to calm Charlie down – she tells him he can certainly ground her, but she and Edward are a “package deal.” He leaves, and Edward reappears. He's apologetic about causing trouble with Charlie, but Bella is like “ain't no thing.”

“If Charlie kicks me out, then there's no need for a graduation deadline, is there?”

Edward starts talking soul nonsense again, and our New Gutsy Bella throws it back in his face. She points out that in Volterra when Edward first saw Bella he thought he was in some kind of afterlife. He thought he was in hell, sure, but you need a soul to go to hell, right? Boom. Sucks to get a taste of your own incoherent ideology medicine, huh Edward?

He's “speechless,” and Bella adds that if he stays, “I don't need heaven.” And then there is a nice little echo of the last line of Twilight:

“Forever,” he vowed, still a little staggered.
“That's all I'm asking for,” I said, and stretched up on my toes so that I could press my lips to his.

Epilogue: Treaty

Almost everything goes back to normal, which we know because Bella says, “Almost everything was back to normal.” Carlisle has returned to work at the hospital, Edward and Alice have re-enrolled in school, and Bella is getting started on college applications. College applications are the worst, huh? It's got to make not being a vampire yet even worse. Though Bella alludes to the fact that Edward once went to Harvard, so maybe being a vampire means filling out college applications all the time. Maybe Bella should wait a few years so she can be an aimless, 20-something blogger-vampire. That would be much better.

Bits and pieces of the writing are not so bad here:

Charlie was not happy with me, or speaking to Edward.

S. Meyer always teases us with marginally more varied sentence construction and fewer tacky, over-adorned phrases at the end of these books, as if to show us What Might Have Been in some version of the multiverse in which she tries harder.

Bella starts thinking of Jacob, who is apparently ignoring her phone calls, and that gets her started on the fairy tale motif again. “I wasn't sure what to do about this leftover, unresolved character,” Bella says. “What was his happily ever after?” Wait, who is talking here? Our narrator or our author? Work out your problems on the page much?

One day Edward is driving Bella home from work and she starts complaining about the way Jacob's been shrugging her off. Edward says maybe it is better that way - “we are what we are,” he says. He doesn't want it to come to blows with Jacob. Abruptly, this comes back:

Abruptly, I remembered what had happened to Paris when Romeo came back. The stage directions were simple: They fight, Paris falls.

Uh-huh. Well, it figures we'd have to reckon with this one last time. I see what you did there, but this is still kind of stupid. Those small instances of better writing are more few and far between here than they were at the end of Twilight, which doesn't bode well for us.

“Well,” I said, and took a deep breath, shaking my head to dispel the words in my head.

I know how you feel Bella. I'm shaking my head to dispel the words in my head as well. She looks up at Edward and talks about how her heart always beats like mad when she looks at him (see a doctor, Bella) but this time, something in his face makes it beat even faster than “its usual besotted pace.” As they pull up to Bella house, she sees her motorcycle sitting in the driveway, which is not the kind of place you want your secret motorcycle to be.

Clearly, Jacob is screwing her (you're welcome) over, and Bella starts crying tears of rage. When Edward informs her that Jacob is still here, waiting, she runs out of the car ready to kick his ass. Edward restrains her.

“Let me go! I'm going to murder him! Traitor!”

I like angry Bella! Jacob is waiting in the woods all hard (you are more welcome) and bitter-faced. Bella remarks that “Somehow, impossibly, he was still growing” (you are the most welcome). They have a standoff in the woods, made marginally interesting by the fact that Jacob seems reluctant to speak, so Edward just says the thoughts he is hearing aloud. Bella accuses Jacob of trying to kill Charlie via heart attack, again invoking Harry Clearwater, and this happens:

“He didn't want to hurt anyone – he just wanted to get you grounded so that you wouldn't be allowed to spend time with me,” Edward murmured, explaining the thoughts that Jacob wouldn't say.

Yeah we figured, S. Meyer. Bella tells him she's already grounded, which is why she hasn't visited, and Jacob is all taken aback. He thought Edward was keeping her off his dick, I mean, La Push. That's not an incorrect thing to assume, right? I mean, if she weren't grounded, Edward still wouldn't let her near a bunch of perpetually shirtless, volatile boys with a history of domestic abuse. And he would right to do so, irritatingly patriarchal though it would seem.

Maybe not though: Edward takes a minute to thank Jacob for protecting Bella in his absence. It's a total Being The Bigger Man moment, and it almost redeems his outburst in the last chapter. But not quite. Edward says something about how he owes Jacob a favor, will give him anything he has the power to give, and Jacob's thoughts immediately flash to something that Edward refuses. Blowjob? From Bella, I mean, not Edward.

Jacob has come to remind Edward about the specific wording of the treaty – the treaty has specific wording? The Volturi could learn from the werewolves! - namely that the whole thing becomes void if one of the Cullens bites a human in the Greater Forks area.

“Bite, not kill,” he emphasized.

Bella sees what he's getting at and is like, “fuck you.” But she ends up confirming Jacob's fears about her desire to get vamped, and so he flips out. Edward puts himself between the two of them, which makes it worse. And then Charlie starts screaming from the porch.

“BELLA!” Charlie's roar echoed from the direction of the house. “YOU GET IN THIS HOUSE THIS INSTANT!”

Charlie. Dude is great. It has the maybe unintentional effect of making this tense standoff between wolves and vampires seem kind of silly – little kids playing a game in the woods until the illusion gets shattered by parents calling them inside. It suddenly gets harder to take anyone seriously. Before the meeting breaks up, Edward and Jacob talk about Victoria, who seems to have fled now that the Cullens are back. Okay, fine. See you next book, Victoria.

Jacob's final bow is sort of interesting, actually. Bella asks if they are still friends, and he basically says no. But he mouths “miss you” and Bella reaches out to him, despite the fact that he's a few yards away. He does the same thing, but when she steps toward him Edward holds her back. She protests, but it is sort of unclear if Edward is trying to keep her away from Jacob or get her back to the (still yelling) Charlie without delay. I like that ambiguity – the Jacob/Edward tension is being queued up as the conflict for the next book and we still don't really know what Edward is going to do. As they leave through the woods, Bella watches Jacob, whose “dark scowl” crumples in pain just as he goes out of sight. He doesn't keep up the tough guy show quite long enough. Wow, S. Meyer, I'm impressed!

We don't get an ending at all, though. As Bella walks toward the house, she recaps her problems. Her best friend considers her an enemy, Victoria wants her dead. The Volturi want her to become a vampire, the werewolves don't. And she forgets about all of them as she sees Charlie's “purple face” on the porch (I'm sure the rest of his body is there too). “I'm here,” Edward says, and here's the last line:

I squared my shoulders and walked forward to meet my fate, with my destiny solidly at my side.

I'm pretty sure you don't need that comma there, and the punctuation-free simplicity of the previous book's final sentence was what really got me jazzed. This is just acceptable. The epilogue serves almost entirely to set up the next book – other than Victoria and Jacob the other plot threads were already resolved. I can imagine that if I'd finished this book before Eclipse came out I'd be more frustrated than anything. Luckily for us, we're getting started on book three next week.

So that's New Moon! Thoughts?

Previously: The New Moon Award Categories