New Moon Rises After Twilight

New Moon is not a well-written book. It's an adequately-written book. When I use the word "adequately," that is to say that author Stephenie Meyer writes in complete sentences. Like it's predecessor, Twilight, New Moon is audacious in its use of "tell-don't-show" dialogue. I started reading the book with my red editing pen in hand, hell bent on making the read less insufferable. But after a while, Meyer's habitual hyperbole trickled into my brain matter like persistent Pacific Northwest rain patter. I forget these things: The goal of fanfiction-style writing is to perpetuate the story ad nauseam. Given the girth of the books in the Twilight saga, author Meyer was given carte blanche.

New Moon picks up six months after the plot Twilight left off. The first few chapters, which suggests that teenage humans and their immortal boyfriends sit around watching Romeo and Juliet on DVD, is grievously unconvincing. Even more unconvincing is Bella's frantic concern about turning into a hag on the eve of her 18th birthday. Okay, not a hag, but physically older than Edward. This is a huge deal for Bella Sue, who's still pestering Edward to turn her into a vampire. When she stares in the mirror, scouring her face for wrinkles, I put the book down for a guffaw. Bella, you cougar, you!

Every romance must have a push-me/pull-you roughly the strength of red licorice, and New Moon is no exception. After Bella suffers a papercut at the Chateau Cullen, Edward and his entire family have more than just a mouth-watering moment. This event causes Edward to break up with Bella in the jerkiest way imaginable -- by abandoning her in the middle of the forrest -- and high-tailing it out of Forks, Washington along with the rest of his family. For her own good, of course. Bella has nightmares and a breakdown, but she soldiers on as former high school pals give her the cool stink-eye. Enter Jacob Black, a 16-year-old deus et machina plucked from the first novel to befriend Bella at a time when she needs an emotional woobie. There's a bunch of inane dialogue about homework and motorbikes, then Jacob turns into a werewolf, and Bella shrugs and says, "What the hey."

Apparently Forks is a Mecca for the unholy, but the unholiest thing about New Moon is that three-fourths of it didn't get redlined into nonexistence. From the point at which Jacob's pack of teenage werewolf friends is introduced, the book becomes a mishmash of tangential mini-melodramas. Bella goes cliff diving and almost drowns but is saved by Jacob, whose feelings for her are turning romantic. A female vampire named Victoria is reprised from her two pages of fame in Twilight to track Bella. Then Edward's sister, Alice, comes back because her gift of foresight had convinced her that Bella was in danger. Jacob's vampire-phobic father sees Alice walking on the street and has a heart attack; ergo, Jacob swears to get revenge against the Cullens. I made that last bit up. If you didn't read the book, you probably believed me.

There's a few of chapters of guff during which Edward, believing Bella is dead, flees to an Italian city called Volterra to taunt a coven of vampiric overseers, the Volturri, into ending his immortal existence. Volterra? Is that even a real city? In Italy? Forget it, I'm not going to waste time on Google. Meyer's bare-bones description of Italy suggests that either she wasn't paying close attention to detail when her group was being hustled through tourists' row or that she arrived at her impressions of it from the Travel Channel. Bella Sue arrives in Volterra (okay, so it's in Tuscany; I Googled) just in time to prevent him from exposing his bare skin to sunlight and revealing his unnatural state. Meyer even introduces a delightfully evil child vampire as one of her illustrious Volturri -- a shameless steal of Ann Rice's Claudia character from her novel Interview with the Vampire. Edward's foolhardiness and Bella Sue's temptingly delicious scent seem to tick off the Volturri righteously, and therefore, they decide to hold a vendetta against her, because ... because ...

Um.

Look, I made it through Nabokov's Pale Fire whilst thumbing back and forth from footnotes to text, so I'm not a reader who easily gets distracted. But I found the plot of New Moon frustratingly erratic. Edward, no more Edward, Jacob, werewolves, Victoria, no more Jacob, Edward again, Volturri, what --? Instead of obsessing about how the plot could be tighter from the point of view of an editor, I decided to apply a sociologist's perspective. Meyer has a penchant for pitting humans against monsters that should logically kill them (and don't) and a protagonist who should logically be their target (but isn't). That is a categorical rule in Mary Sue fiction. But the dynamic between Bella and her male paramours registers strong dysfunction. Meyer seems insistent on getting her Mary Sue character smarmy with mythological male creatures who warn her of/threaten her with their dangerous qualities and alternately act like major jerks by throwing her away then suddenly rushing to save her. Issues.

I stopped reading New Moon around page 350 and speed-read the rest. I knew how the story would end: Bella and Edward kiss and make up (I saw the posters for the New Moon movie). How can I summarize the second installment of the Twilight saga? Well, if you've ever had a friend with a small child or had one of your own, you've been subject to the priceless twist-and-turn mechanisms of their imaginary tales: "There was this girl, and she found out that she was a princess, and then there was this boy and he was magic, he turned her into a silver rosebush, and then he changed her back into a girl again because he loved he, and --"

I find strange consolation in the likelihood that the desk of Meyer's editor is creaking under the weight of unsolicited manuscripts, each written in fanfiction-style prose, each begging to be published and achieve the same success as the Twilight saga. I feel dread when I consider that some of them actually will.