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Previous entires can be found in the directory.Chapter 3: Motives
Eventually it dawns on her that Jacob was checking to see if she was a vampire – she's been gone for three days, after all. It's kind of amazing that the same Bella who almost literally seemed incapable of putting two and two together in New Moon can make this leap so fast. But whatever, this is better. (“But whatever, this is better” should basically be the motto of Eclipse so far.) “I tried to think about it in a logical way,” Bella says. ABOUT FUCKING TIME YOU TRIED THAT BELLA.
She shares her conclusion with Edward – Jacob was trying to make sure the treaty was unbroken. “We'll have to leave,” she says. “So that it doesn't break the treaty. We won't ever be able to come back.” Like the Cullens couldn't take a bunch of werewolves? But at least there are some stakes, some consequences to the whole vampire thing now. Before we all wondered what the drawbacks were. There you have it: abandoning your parents and friends, leaving them hurt and confused for years until they die. Not fun.
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The next morning, as they pull into the school parking lot, Edward suddenly gets all tense and white-knuckled. I thought we were over that. He tries to get Bella to stay in the car, because Jacob is waiting on the sidewalk – his motorcycle parked illegally so we know he is a BADASS now. ("Stay in the car," by the way? Does that ever work on anyone?) Jacob's in a tight black t-shirt, wearing a Sam Uley-like expression, all muscled up and sexy. S. Meyer is trying to turn you on right now – are you turned on? Random kids from Forks High are eying him nervously (“It's a minority!”-Forks High). His new nickname is Vincent Black Shadow.
Edward and Jacob have a tense conversation, and it becomes clear that they are discussing official vampire/werewolf business. Something bad happened recently, and Bella suddenly wonders why she didn't hear about it. Jacob, in the right for once, objects to Edward keeping Bella in the dark. So does Bella.
“He didn't tell you that his big... brother crossed the line Saturday night?” he asked, his tone thickly layered with sarcasm.
Still not how sarcasm works, S. Meyer. Some things never change, I guess. The line crossing is both literal and figurative – Emmett trespassed on werewolf territory and almost got into it with one of the wolves. What was he doing even close to the border, you ask?
Amazingly, on page 79, we get to the quote on the back of the book. Already? So clearly this is a significant moment. In a “burst of intuition” Bella realizes that Alice's vision, the trip to Florida, and this are all related. “It was never going to end, was it?” she wonders. Oh no, Victoria is back!
I want to give S. Meyer a little credit for apparently recognizing her own limitations. We've got a chapter here that is nearly identical in structure to the chapter from Twilight in which Bella travels to Phoenix. Recall that back then, Bella started out narrating from the hotel and then worked her way backwards; here we start with Edward and Bella returning from Florida and backtrack from there (I've mentioned before that S. Meyer has a particular imaginative deficit where she can't seem to switch locations without tons of unnecessary exposition; the exception to the rule seems to be interstate travel. It's almost as if the logistics of getting from WA to FL or AZ are just too overwhelming for S. Meyer to contemplate). That chapter in Twilight was written in a kind of shaky, inconsistent past-perfect tense, but this time S. Meyer doesn't bother. The flashback to the Florida visit is written in the regular past-tense like everything else, and the transitions are fluid and intuitive and interesting. Edward asks Bella (on the drive home from the airport) if she's sad to leave and she says she's “more relieved than sad.” She proceeds to re-live a conversation she had with her mother earlier in the day. That's enough of a transition for me.
When you run over conversations in your head, do you translate to past-perfect tense? If we accept the fact that S. Meyer is maybe not the greatest prose-stylist, we can take a little more pleasure in the places where she seems to stumble upon intuitive methods of storytelling. For some reason I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert's now-nearly-cliché explanation of George W. Bush: he thinks with his gut. That's a bad thing in a president, not necessarily in a writer.
Am I saying S. Meyer is the George W. Bush of YA Fiction? Yes, I guess that is what I'm saying. And even though for the most part I think George W. Bush is abhorrent, that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read his book. Sometimes I wish I'd started this series when the Twilight books were being released, when this was still George W. Bush's America, when religious conservatism felt more mainstream than it probably ever was. (That isn't to discount the terrifying force of the Tea Party/Sarah Palin movement, but that is essentially a counter-culture version of what was once the status quo; zeitgeist-wise that makes a big difference.) So much of S. Meyer's series is utterly baffling to me – would it have made sense before Barack Obama? Maybe.
Probably not, though.
On the beach, in Florida, Bella walks with her mother. Renee says she's “worried” about Bella and Edward, saying their relationship is “more serious than I'd been thinking.” Bella's got Edward's marriage proposal hanging over her head like a guillotine, so obviously this doesn't help. But Renee goes on to basically say that she thinks it's weird that Edward is so “intense” about Bella. Way to give the girl a complex, Renee! Mother of the year up in this bitch.
“I mean, what does he see in you?”-Renee
She also remarks that he's too “careful” around her, like Renee is reading all of our minds (“Just fuck already”-Renee), but the most compelling part happens when Bella's mother tells her she wishes she could see how she and Edward move around each other.
“They way you move – you orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. When he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. [TWSS, I know] Like magnets... or gravity. You're like a... satellite, or something. I've never seen anything like it.”
Is it me or is this the most compelling (and maybe only) testament to Edward and Bella's love we've seen so far? I've written in the past about how even bizarre lesbian slashfiction can make a more believable romance than can S. Meyer, but this is a step in the right direction.
Bella manages to convince her mom she shouldn't be worried, and Edward's “icy fingers” across Bella's cheek bring her mentally back to the car on the way home from the airport. It's sort of suggested that she's fallen asleep, which undercuts the earlier natural transition – what, was that conversation with Renee supposed to be a dream? It's actually the kind of cut utilized to weird and stupid effect in the Twilight film adaptations – after the Volterra sequence in New Moon Bella wakes up screaming, like it was supposed to be a nightmare or something. Huh? This is why people say these movies are incomprehensible for the uninitiated. But as we see here, it happens in the books, too. Maybe it's not that only Twi-Hards get it, it's that only Twi-Hards know there is nothing to get. Also, Edward says this:
“We're home, Sleeping Beauty. Time to awake.”
Oy vey.
At home Charlie greets Bella enthusiastically, hugging her and everything. Awwww! But he soon informs her that Jacob has been calling all day, like a jilted girl. Ugh, this guy. The phone rings, Bella answers, and Jacob's “husky” voice on the other end of the line sends a “wave of wistfulness” through Bella's body; through which part of her body she doesn't say. Bella pretty much writes a Dashboard Confessional song right there, doing a mental catalog of her memories of Jacob:
...a rocky beach strewn with driftwood trees, a garage made of plastic sheds, warm sodas in a paper bag, a tiny room with one too-small shabby loveseat.
Jacob wants to know why she hasn't called yet; doesn't he know how needy he sounds? Bella is like, “Bitch, I just walked in the door!” Jacob doesn't say much, even – just wants to know if she'll be in school tomorrow, and hangs up. Bella turns to Edward, confused.
“Your guess is probably better than mine,” Edward said, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Mmm,” I murmured. That was true. I knew Jake inside and out.
Don't know if I'd go that far, Bella, though you certainly had plenty of chances. She starts making dinner for Charlie, wondering why Jacob would give a shit if she went to school.
When you run over conversations in your head, do you translate to past-perfect tense? If we accept the fact that S. Meyer is maybe not the greatest prose-stylist, we can take a little more pleasure in the places where she seems to stumble upon intuitive methods of storytelling. For some reason I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert's now-nearly-cliché explanation of George W. Bush: he thinks with his gut. That's a bad thing in a president, not necessarily in a writer.
Am I saying S. Meyer is the George W. Bush of YA Fiction? Yes, I guess that is what I'm saying. And even though for the most part I think George W. Bush is abhorrent, that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read his book. Sometimes I wish I'd started this series when the Twilight books were being released, when this was still George W. Bush's America, when religious conservatism felt more mainstream than it probably ever was. (That isn't to discount the terrifying force of the Tea Party/Sarah Palin movement, but that is essentially a counter-culture version of what was once the status quo; zeitgeist-wise that makes a big difference.) So much of S. Meyer's series is utterly baffling to me – would it have made sense before Barack Obama? Maybe.
Probably not, though.
On the beach, in Florida, Bella walks with her mother. Renee says she's “worried” about Bella and Edward, saying their relationship is “more serious than I'd been thinking.” Bella's got Edward's marriage proposal hanging over her head like a guillotine, so obviously this doesn't help. But Renee goes on to basically say that she thinks it's weird that Edward is so “intense” about Bella. Way to give the girl a complex, Renee! Mother of the year up in this bitch.
“I mean, what does he see in you?”-Renee
She also remarks that he's too “careful” around her, like Renee is reading all of our minds (“Just fuck already”-Renee), but the most compelling part happens when Bella's mother tells her she wishes she could see how she and Edward move around each other.
“They way you move – you orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. When he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. [TWSS, I know] Like magnets... or gravity. You're like a... satellite, or something. I've never seen anything like it.”
Is it me or is this the most compelling (and maybe only) testament to Edward and Bella's love we've seen so far? I've written in the past about how even bizarre lesbian slashfiction can make a more believable romance than can S. Meyer, but this is a step in the right direction.
Bella manages to convince her mom she shouldn't be worried, and Edward's “icy fingers” across Bella's cheek bring her mentally back to the car on the way home from the airport. It's sort of suggested that she's fallen asleep, which undercuts the earlier natural transition – what, was that conversation with Renee supposed to be a dream? It's actually the kind of cut utilized to weird and stupid effect in the Twilight film adaptations – after the Volterra sequence in New Moon Bella wakes up screaming, like it was supposed to be a nightmare or something. Huh? This is why people say these movies are incomprehensible for the uninitiated. But as we see here, it happens in the books, too. Maybe it's not that only Twi-Hards get it, it's that only Twi-Hards know there is nothing to get. Also, Edward says this:
“We're home, Sleeping Beauty. Time to awake.”
Oy vey.
At home Charlie greets Bella enthusiastically, hugging her and everything. Awwww! But he soon informs her that Jacob has been calling all day, like a jilted girl. Ugh, this guy. The phone rings, Bella answers, and Jacob's “husky” voice on the other end of the line sends a “wave of wistfulness” through Bella's body; through which part of her body she doesn't say. Bella pretty much writes a Dashboard Confessional song right there, doing a mental catalog of her memories of Jacob:
...a rocky beach strewn with driftwood trees, a garage made of plastic sheds, warm sodas in a paper bag, a tiny room with one too-small shabby loveseat.
Jacob wants to know why she hasn't called yet; doesn't he know how needy he sounds? Bella is like, “Bitch, I just walked in the door!” Jacob doesn't say much, even – just wants to know if she'll be in school tomorrow, and hangs up. Bella turns to Edward, confused.
“Your guess is probably better than mine,” Edward said, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Mmm,” I murmured. That was true. I knew Jake inside and out.
Don't know if I'd go that far, Bella, though you certainly had plenty of chances. She starts making dinner for Charlie, wondering why Jacob would give a shit if she went to school.
“Truancy is a serious problem, kids. Knowing is half the battle.”- Sam Uley
Eventually it dawns on her that Jacob was checking to see if she was a vampire – she's been gone for three days, after all. It's kind of amazing that the same Bella who almost literally seemed incapable of putting two and two together in New Moon can make this leap so fast. But whatever, this is better. (“But whatever, this is better” should basically be the motto of Eclipse so far.) “I tried to think about it in a logical way,” Bella says. ABOUT FUCKING TIME YOU TRIED THAT BELLA.
She shares her conclusion with Edward – Jacob was trying to make sure the treaty was unbroken. “We'll have to leave,” she says. “So that it doesn't break the treaty. We won't ever be able to come back.” Like the Cullens couldn't take a bunch of werewolves? But at least there are some stakes, some consequences to the whole vampire thing now. Before we all wondered what the drawbacks were. There you have it: abandoning your parents and friends, leaving them hurt and confused for years until they die. Not fun.
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"Sucks to be y'all. I don't remember shit! Ha!”-Alice Cullen
The next morning, as they pull into the school parking lot, Edward suddenly gets all tense and white-knuckled. I thought we were over that. He tries to get Bella to stay in the car, because Jacob is waiting on the sidewalk – his motorcycle parked illegally so we know he is a BADASS now. ("Stay in the car," by the way? Does that ever work on anyone?) Jacob's in a tight black t-shirt, wearing a Sam Uley-like expression, all muscled up and sexy. S. Meyer is trying to turn you on right now – are you turned on? Random kids from Forks High are eying him nervously (“It's a minority!”-Forks High). His new nickname is Vincent Black Shadow.
Who has crossed arms and a badass bike? THIS GUY.
“He didn't tell you that his big... brother crossed the line Saturday night?” he asked, his tone thickly layered with sarcasm.
Still not how sarcasm works, S. Meyer. Some things never change, I guess. The line crossing is both literal and figurative – Emmett trespassed on werewolf territory and almost got into it with one of the wolves. What was he doing even close to the border, you ask?
Amazingly, on page 79, we get to the quote on the back of the book. Already? So clearly this is a significant moment. In a “burst of intuition” Bella realizes that Alice's vision, the trip to Florida, and this are all related. “It was never going to end, was it?” she wonders. Oh no, Victoria is back!
Wait, Victoria left?
4 comments:
I really hate that quote from Renee. It basically says that E is the center of the universe and B just revolves around him. Which, okay, fair enough, is true. But what mother sees that and just lets that go? I am not rereading right now, but I remember thinking that if I saw my daughter having given up that much of herself I would be a little loath to let her go without at least a "don't lose yourself" or something. Also, E is kind of a weird dude. I would have liked to see more of Renee and Phil's conversations with him. I can't imagine, unless he put the "whammy" on them, that Renee could have possibly felt at ease about B and him. I would also like to hear some of Renee and Charlie's phone conversations about how much time B and E spend together.
Why do I only want to see the most boring fanfiction? It's like I want to make sure that the characters are paying attention and taking care of each other.
I agree Rosanne. I mean, given Renee's whole "don't get too wrapped up in a man at such a young age" attitude, it's inconsistent that she would just let that go. I do think her description of them is very apt, though.
I think I was just looking at the first part of the quote, because for some reason I interpreted Renee to mean this was the way they behaved around each other. As in, they were each other's satellites, not Bella was his. But you're both right, it is a little weird. I'm just eager for SOME EVIDENCE that these two love each other in a convincing way. Because otherwise Janine wins.
Vincent Black Shadow is his new nickname! Perfect! (How does Zac even know that bike?)
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