BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 18: Limited Omniscient

Jacob returns to the house and finds that Edward has laid out clothes for him. (What, a fucking flesh-colored turtle neck and some cargo pants? Maybe a nice vest?) There's (too) much made of the fact that the clothes smell like vampires; S. Meyer's conception of how scents stick to clothes and trees and, you know, THE AIR is a little extreme. Jacob considers his vagrant status as he puts on Emmett's ill-fitting threads in the woods, and realizes that having no possessions will eventually get annoying. I never really got the idea that Jacob couldn't just return to the Rez and pick up some of his crap, did you? It's like, right down the street! One thing S. Meyer likes to do is keep nebulous threats surrounding her story at all times, which is why the danger presented by the wolfpack, which could easily be very specific, has lately been undercut by the meeting with Jared in the last chapter. We don't know what the rest of the wolves are after, if anything. Much like the Volturi, the threat is entirely based on our heroes' suspicions. And I don't trust our heroes' instincts! Threats are always kept vague like this so that S. Meyer can dispose of them quickly, if needed. I understand the temptation to not write yourself into a hole, but our author is way too guarded. In the comments recently, Kira likened these books to a rough draft that somehow got published by accident. That feels especially true these days, where S. Meyer seems to still be trying to decide what to do next. Write an outline or something! Don't leave us marooned in the middle of your book for a hundred pages while you work this shit out!

Chapter 14: You Know Things Are Bad When You Feel Guilty For Being Rude To Vampires

Jacob goes into the house, and most of the furniture has been returned to its rightful place. Bella's not in a hospital bed anymore but she's still hooked up to an IV. “Alice, Jasper, and Emmett were out of sight, but I heard them murmuring upstairs,” Jacob says. Finally, S. Meyer addresses the long absence of her coolest characters. They've been murmuring upstairs! Well, that explains EVERYTHING. Bella is excited when Jacob comes in, and he silently wishes she wouldn't be so enthusiastic. I'm starting to like Jacob! It's been a long time since he's had an evil thought. He wishes Bella would appear to not care about him, because that would make it “easier to stay away.”

Edward, as it turns out, doesn't need to be briefed on what went down with the wolfpack. He's getting better at hearing Jacob's thoughts, so distance is becoming less of an issue. Well, that's sufficiently creepy, but at least we don't have to hear about it twice.

“Great, how far am I going to have to go to jerk off now?”-Jacob Black

There's a tepid section where Rosalie mocks Jacob's ill-fitting clothes, asking him where the flood is, and he counter's with a blonde joke. “I've already heard that one,” Rosalie says. She wins this round.

Jacob leaves to sleep in the woods, but Edward follows him out. There's another needlessly long section where Edward informs him that Esme feels guilty about how “bereft” he, Leah, and Seth are. Edward offers the comforts of the Cullen home to them. “Alice rarely allows us to wear the same thing twice,” he says. I thought that was more of an expression than anything, but much like the stone and rock metaphors that eventually ceased to be metaphors, the Cullens have “piles of brand new clothes” to offer because they literally don't wear things twice. (In the deleted scenes of Twilight we saw how acting snooty and rich was more effective cover than actually blending in for the Cullens, but that's a notion that hasn't been sufficiently established in the actual text.) Jacob is doubtful that Leah, in particular, will be receptive.

Just as Edward is about to depart, there's a “low, pained cry” from inside the house. They both return to find Bella curled up in pain, Alice at the top of the stairs “staring down into the room with her hands pressed to her temples.” Jacob remarks that it weirdly seems like she is “barred from entering.” Now, that would be interesting-- if Alice's opposition to the baby was actually violent or something, but the answer is less interesting and more just narratively convienient. But first, Jacob realizes that as Bella gets stronger, the baby-monster is getting stronger too; Bella's cry of pain was from the baby's kick breaking one of her ribs. Scarce though it is amongst the wreckage of S. Meyer's indecision, the fragments she is shoring against her ruins, this body horror stuff is really cool, and luckily the film version will have no choice but to focus on it more than the rest of this stuff (to prevent people from falling asleep in the theater). Carlisle and Edward and Rosalie go upstairs to the home X-Ray machine (okay sure) and Jacob sits down to rest in the front-door jamb. Finally, at long fucking last, Alice comes downstairs and speaks words. Welcome back, Alice!

Jacob asks why she isn't upstairs with the rest of the family. “Headache,” she says. Jacob remarks on how tiny she is, “about the size of one of my arms.” He says she looks even smaller now because she's “hunched in on herself,” and appears to be in pain. Jacob, acting once again like S. Meyer's guilty conscience, asks Alice why she doesn't hang out with Bella anymore. She confesses that she can't, because, “the fetus” is what is giving her a headache.

Ah, someone who felt like I did. It was pretty easy to recognize. She said the word grudgingly, the way Edward did.

I'm happy my suspicions have been confirmed. Alice is very firmly in the “abort” camp, and even better: it seems like she feels this way for mostly selfish reasons. She explains the way the “fetus” blurs her vision, that it hurts her head to watch Bella's future. Sitting near Jacob apparently gives her a pleasing numbness, “like having my eyes closed.”

“Happy to be of service, ma'am,” I mumbled.

Don't talk like that, you're going to turn her on, dude! Anyway, Alice enjoys her rich, full-body high and Jacob falls asleep. It makes sense that Alice can't see the baby's future. I mean, it doesn't actually make sense, but there was nothing else S. Meyer could have done. First of all we've basically run out of real dramatic stakes; this entire book has revolved around bogus mysteries: Is Bella's car for Israeli diplomats? Where will Edward's bachelor party be? And right now the only thing we're going on is: What kind of baby will Bella have? That's a problematic point to revolve your plot around when you have someone who sees the future on staff. Plus, too many previous developments have already been built around imperfections in Alice's power. We can't do that again, so we've got to find a way to just factor her out of the equation. Which sucks, but again, what else can you do? If this is the story S. Meyer wants to write, she has to write it mostly without Alice.

My other concern is, what happens when the baby is born? Will Alice's power STILL not work? Will she have to learn to live without it? Will she leave the family in protest of having to deal with an infant for eternity? That's a kind of compelling storyline I am sure S. Meyer will not bother exploring. (Over the weekend “Alice Cullen” was a trending topic on Twitter for reasons nobody really seemed to understand. But plenty of people called for S. Meyer to write a book ABOUT Alice. Let me say, I am not one of those people. Absence of detail is what allows us to make Alice great. Leave the writing of the Great American Alice Novel to other people! Like me!)

Jacob wakes up a while later to find Seth Clearwater sitting with the Cullens, his arm around Bella, eating a huge plate of food. Alice is near him, she's "found another painkiller" as Jacob puts it. Seth Clearwater the ladykiller, huh? ("I'd suggest a threeway if you weren't so pregnant and gross."-Alice Cullen) Jacob eventually realizes he slept through the night and chastises Seth for not waking him. You just KNOW Alice and Seth spent the night drawing penises on his face with a Sharpie, even if S. Meyer neglects to mention it.

Bella's in better visual shape, she's got her cup of blood nearby. Carlisle approaches Jacob and asks him a strategic question: they're not sure where to hunt, given the potential threat of Sam Uley and his boys. Jacob isn't much help; he basically says, "they probably won't attack," but with three times as many words. Alice offers up her services to protect any hunting party that might go out. How would oral sex help, though? Actually, what she'll do is advise them to not take any routes that disappear from her vision. That's a pretty boring work-around, but it sort of answers the earlier question about Alice's future, and is one of the few interesting moments in this chapter. We end on a weird exchange between Jacob and Esme; the matriarch of the Cullens wants Jacob to take a plate of food and he feels guilty for planning to just dump it in the woods. His reasons for feeling guilty are clear: Esme is really nice. But his reasons for not wanting the food in the first place aren't! What is his motivation? Better question: why is there so little going on in this book that I even care about his motivation for refusing a plate of food?