Eleven Problems With Eclipse

"Wait, I'm confused."

1. Stephenie Meyer's narrative devices are rarely employed with any specific purpose.

When we started this book I objected to the use of prefaces in The Twilight Saga. Not one of them has served the narrative in any way other than building nebulous anticipation, which is also accomplished by putting those vague quotes on the back of the book. It's redundant. And it's not like Twilight books work their way toward show-stopping resolutions or twists, so what are we even anticipating? Eclipse also has some serious problems with various between-paragraph punctuation: sometimes there is an extra space between paragraphs to indicate a shift in focus or a transition in time, sometimes there are a few asterisks instead, and sometimes there are enormous jumps in chronology with no break or extra punctuation whatsoever. And don't even get me started on ellipses! S. Meyer had one inspired turn back in New Moon when Edward left and we got those blank pages, but every other "form over content" trick she has tried has been a swing and a miss.

2. The Edward/Jacob tension is fundamentally bogus and yet it's the engine that's supposed to be powering most of this book.

Read Eclipse one way and it's kind of a great mystery story: what is the deal with these killings in Seattle? Unfortunately that isn't the central thrust of the book; the central thrust of the book is "will Bella chose Jacob or Edward?" And of course, she essentially already has chosen Edward before the book has even started. Here's what I wrote in "Amores Perros":

[I]t's sort of irritating to watch Bella/S. Meyer leap through increasingly narrow rhetorical hoops in order to justify [the tension]. I love Jacob (as a friend), I can't bear to hurt him (as a friend), I miss him (as a friend). It's almost like we're expected to ignore those parentheticals, like we're supposed to see this the way Jacob does.

It becomes almost impossible to read the book the way S. Meyer intended you to read it because it's impossible to understand what that way could have been. Are we supposed to think of Jacob as a valid option or not? For most of the book, it seems like we are not. And suddenly toward the end it seems like we are.

Bella also has this terrible habit of making every problem seem like the worst problem. TRIAGE, BITCH! Were it that the vampire army plot seemed more dire than the Jacob/Edward drama, I might not be so offended by this. There is a real problem in this book and a problem that is entirely the result of/a creation of Bella's brain. And yet Bella treats the latter as more serious than the former, or seems to, which makes us hate her even more.

3. Several plot threads disappear completely.

Who are Angela and Ben, exactly? Why do they seem so important at the beginning of this book? After all of my outrage over Quil imprinting on a two-year old, why is it never mentioned again? Very early in the book, after Alice has a vision at the cafeteria table and Bella asks what it's about, Edward says she's been seeing Jasper in a strange place. It's made clear later that she was seeing something else at the time; was Edward just making something up or is there a dropped subplot somewhere in there?

"You lost me."

4. Alice's visions being inconsistent is okay up to a point, but several of S. Meyer's exceptions seem irreconcilably nonsensical.

Alice's failure to see any of Victoria's involvement in the creation of the vampire army is incomprehensible. How did Victoria manage to create an army and then come and find Edward and Bella without EVER thinking about it? That is the explanation offered, and when it is presented to a reader in the middle of a life-or-death situation it's easy to just say "okay" and keep reading because one wants to know what happens next. But books should not ONLY work on that level, and Eclipse only works on that level.

Similarly: in New Moon the wolves are presented as volatile - they cannot control their phasing in and out of form. By Eclipse all of them seem to have gained a measure of control, and Jacob's control is presented as expert. Yet the justification for Alice's inability to see any aspects of the future that involve wolves is still presented as due to that volatility. From "Windowstill":

“Carlisle theorizes that it's because their lives are so ruled by their transformations. It's more an involuntary reaction than a decision. Utterly unpredictable, and it changes everything about them,” Edward says… As Jacob and the gang get better with the self control, wouldn't Alice's visions also improve? It's totally fine that S. Meyer wants to have a bunch of strange rules and exceptions to those rules on which to build her story; that's what Inception does too. But her explanations are so flimsy, and always voiced by characters as maybes: this could be what is going on, but we're not really sure. Nobody's really sure, least of all S. Meyer.

Adding on to that, she has a bad habit of having characters call attention to plot problems. If Alice sees something she should't have the ability to see, someone else will say "Hey, it's really weird she was able to see that." It's like S. Meyer's guilty conscience did a re-write on this book. Sometimes we get stuck with particularly ridiculous scenes of exposition, like when Bella explains to Edward that Victoria created the vampire army and he asks her a series of questions: how would Victoria know about vampire armies? How would Victoria know about Alice's powers? Bella magically has a solution to every problem. At the end of the scene Edward notes, "You're very perceptive today." Huh!

5. Bella should not actually be opposed to marrying Edward, Edward should not care about marrying Bella.

Bella is supposed to be an old soul, Edward's family makes a concerted effort to keep up with the times. And yet on the issue of marriage both of their stances are out of character: Bella fears being thought of as "that girl," fears rumors that she might be pregnant, fears her mother's reaction; Edward is stuck on this old-timey vision of pre-WWI romance, and tries to argue against the "transitory customs" of the modern era. YOUR CUSTOMS WERE TRANSITORY TOO, WHICH IS WHY THEY NO LONGER EXIST, BUDDY!

Bella wants to be with Edward forever and has no problem fathoming the eternal commitment of their relationship, yet she has a problem with making it official for the above reasons. That doesn't make any sense! Conversely, Edward's family, for the purposes of survival, tries to keep a low profile. A marriage certificate is not exactly low profile. From "I Will Bury You In Time":

They are both going to be immortal vampires living largely off the grid – you can't tell me that any of the Cullens are carrying around legit forms of ID. A marriage certificate is just begging for a joint investigation from the IRS and INS. And we all know what happens when multiple federal agencies get together. David Koresh knows what I'm talking about.

If you're keeping track, there are really more reasons why Edward is wrong than Bella. You can basically prove him wrong from any angle you like! But three wrongs don't make another wrong any less wrong.

"Does anybody understand what is going on here?"

6. Imprinting is horrific, and not treated as such.

SPEAKING OF WRONGS AND WRONGNESS. The first problem with imprinting is that when you are writing a romance novel, you probably shouldn't incorporate a magical Indian spell that forces people to love one another unless you are writing A Midsummer Night's Dream and making simultaneous ironic commentary about love and magic. And obviously S. Meyer is not doing that stuff! She undermines herself with the very concept of imprinting, but also makes it an irritatingly vague rule among members of the wolf pack. Like Alice's powers, it's something no one fully understands so S. Meyer doesn't have to fully understand it either.

But that isn't the HUGE GLARING PROBLEM with imprinting. The problem is its close associations with domestic abuse, infidelity, and CHILD MOLESTATION. Sam Uley leaves Leah for Emily, which obviously upsets Emily until it doesn't anymore. From "No, Non Je Regrette Rien":

[Sam] just WORE [EMILY] DOWN! Perfect! Jacob also says that “weirdly enough” the whole thing where Sam ripped off Emily's fucking face was what really brought them together. PERFECTER. “Weirdly enough,” indeed, Jacob. Weirdly enough, my heart is so warmed right now by this wonderful story that my blood is LITERALLY boiling and my skin is melting off!

That same "wearing down" thing is employed later when Quil imprints on a two year old girl. Bella is outraged, and we're outraged, but Jacob (and strangely, S. Meyer) tries to calm us down.

“Quil will be the best, kindest big brother any kid ever had...And then, when she's older and needs a friend, he'll be more understanding, trustworthy, and reliable than anyone else she knows. And then, when she's grown up, they'll be as happy as Emily and Sam.”

(Again, when specifically will these transitions (from ward to best friend to lover) occur? Has S. Meyer thought about that?) And maddeningly, this excuse that a guy can make a girl love him by sheer force of will comes up. That is a seriously dangerous notion, S. Meyer. Again, how did she meet her husband?

“Of course. But why wouldn't she choose him, in the end? He'll be her perfect match. Like he was designed for her alone.”

S. Meyer should think this is outrageous, and sometimes it feels like she does. But not most of the time. This is from when Bella observes Jared and his imprint victim, Kim, and the way he looks at her.

It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collector finding an undiscovered Da Vinci, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn child.

A MOTHER INTO THE FACE OF HER NEWBORN CHILD. JESUS.

7. In Breaking Dawn, there better not be any references to vampires being like stones or Quileutes being "russet-colored."

WE GET THAT JACOB HAS BROWN SKIN. WE GET THAT VAMPIRES ARE HARD. ENOUGH. (I really love early in the book when Bella says "his face could have been carved from stone" to indicate Edward being angry. HIS FACE COULD HAVE BEEN CARVED FROM STONE ANYWAY!)

8. Edward and Bella so frequently misunderstand each other that I can't be sure they really like each other.

This is more of a New Moon problem than an Eclipse problem, but it still occurs regularly here. S. Meyer's only trick is "this person doesn't understand what this other person actually means." Edward thinks Bella wants to be a vampire so she can fuck other vampires, Bella doesn't think Edward wants her in his family. Their real reasons for opposing each other are even dumber. Jacob thinks Bella's attempts to restrain him when he sexually assaults her are actually gestures of wild passion. The Cullen family misinterprets the vampire army to be a threat against them, not Bella. And so on, and so on, and so on. It's especially troubling when it comes to Bella/Edward misunderstandings - aren't they supposed to know each other really well?

9. The books' relationship with sex is convoluted and terrifying.

We've talked before about the issues around Edward and Bella, and really, the problems are too numerous to list here. But let's talk about what happens between Bella and Jacob by the end of the book. Is Jacob a rapist or does he really show Bella that she loves him when he repeatedly forces her to kiss him? A Judge in Tennessee recently wrote that gays should be forced out of the military, but that lesbians already serving should essentially be subject to corrective rape by male soldiers. I wish I was kidding.

“My solution would get the distaff part of our homosexual population off our collective ‘Broke Back,’ thus giving straight male GIs a fair shot at converting lesbians and bringing them into the mainstream.” (via Pride in Utah)

This line of thinking is remarkably similar to S. Meyer's.

10. The heavy plot of this book eventually amounts to pretty much nothing.

This only really works as a complaint for the series as a whole. At the beginning of this book, Edward wants to get married and Bella doesn't. Victoria is alive, and the Volturi are a looming and vague threat. At the end, Edward wants to get married and Bella doesn't want to as much, Victoria is dead, and the Volturi are a looming and vague threat. Not only is the vampire army subplot basically a gigantic distraction (what's the point of reading a long series if you feel like the author is spinning his or her wheels?), but it's also kind of stupid. From: "A Wolf At The Door":

Can I just say how dumb and out of place I think this whole army plot is? It's like S. Meyer is trying to slip some J.R.R. Tolkien shit on us. An army is marching on Forks? Isn't this series supposed to be about interpersonal (and intermonsternal) dynamics? Why so much military history and strategy as of late, then? It's probably just to postpone the fucking; S. Meyer is running out of ways to keep these characters out of each other's pants. And war is a fairly predictable side-effect of sexual frustration, is it not? That's why the Swedes never fight. So I guess it works, on that level.

Unlike the distraction-heavy plot of New Moon which nonetheless advanced Edward and Bella's relationship, I don't feel like this story advanced much of anything.

11. Outrage after outrage is piled upon us until we don't care about anything anymore.

The irritating vampire army subplot is really just a way to connect every individual set piece in which S. Meyer bludgeons us with her convoluted morals. I only flew off the handle once or twice during New Moon; this book nearly gave me an aneurysm:

Imprinting, then imprinting with a two-year old. Edward's irritating religious convictions becoming more and more well-defined, until it turns out he's trying to make sure Bella gets to go hang out with Jesus. The incredibly sexist portrayal of Leah Clearwater. Jacob's rape kiss, and then his CORRECTIVE rape kiss later on, which makes Bella realize she loves him. By the time Jacob forces himself on Bella a second time, we've given up. We let S. Meyer force herself on us, too.

Also: scent-science. Also: the fact that vampire strength is correlated to the size of the animal they eat. Also: the fact that because vampires are seemingly made of stone, they are also very set in their ways. These are not moral outrages, they are just outrageously stupid. I'm not sure which set is worse.

The entire collection of Blogging Eclipse posts can be found in the directory.