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Daniel Handler, Adverbs: A novel of interconnected stories about love: wanting it, having it, losing it. One of Handler’s conceits is that the verbs are irrelevant; it’s the ways in which we love, the adverbs, that matter. But I wasn’t convinced of this by his characters, who rarely perceived themselves to have choices. Several characters have the same names, or maybe they’re the same people remembered differently. Handler’s style here seemed very close to his Lemony Snicket style, in contrast to his earlier, pre-Snicket books as Handler, and it works much better in a fantastic story about conspiracies than in a book where the nonrealistic elements seem more like the characters’ delusions (a woman drawing a mask on her face in magic marker so she can attend a masked ball) than like useful plot points or metaphors for the obstacles we all face.
Richard Aleas, Songs of Innocence: I know the author, so I don’t have anything particularly objective to say about this book, part of the Hard Case crime series, which features pulp-noir plots in modern settings. His narrator investigates the death of his friend and occasional lover Dorrie, a Columbia student with a (relatively) secret life. The police deem it a suicide, but John Blake knows it can’t be, because she didn’t destroy all the evidence of that secret life. His investigation turns deadly for several people, and the resolution slotted all the earlier clues grimly into place. Doing a noir plot in an age when people are ashamed of a lot less than they used to be is difficult, but Aleas pulls it off. He also incorporates cellphones and email into the plot, which in classic form often depended on inaccessibility at crucial moments; it’s interesting just to see how constant accessibility and the ever-present possibility of surveillance change the characters’ interactions even as they play out the old roles.
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight: This was the wrong book at the wrong time for me. Seventeen-year-old Bella moves from Arizona to dreary Washington to give her flighty mother a chance at happiness, and falls in love with the infuriating Edward. When he saves her life from a freak accident, she quickly realizes that there’s more to him than stunning gorgeousness – and he feels the same way about her. Why? That’s a good question. She’s beautiful (though she doesn’t know/believe it), she smells good (uniquely good to him, but also good to others of his kind), and for some unknown reason he can’t read her mind, as he can read everyone else in the world. The relationship is incredibly unequal because Edward has special powers and Bella’s only power is her power to attract him, which just doesn’t cancel out the rest. To her credit, Bella realizes this, but not in time to make her likable.
The basic problem is that Bella is entirely defined by the fact that she’s irresistable to Edward. If she were other than a collection of traits (prickliness, clumsiness, attractiveness) that exist only in relation to their effect on him, I could forgive the emo switches from misery to joy and back again on each page. It’s realistic for a teen, but made me roll my eyes the fiftieth time she went from angry to love-dazed in two lines. Bella narrates that she pays no attention in school, so consumed is she with her love life, and yet she doesn’t fail a single class. That’s a minor annoyance, but it is typical – she never brought me inside her obsession, and so I found the story boring and overdramatized.
Richard Aleas, Songs of Innocence: I know the author, so I don’t have anything particularly objective to say about this book, part of the Hard Case crime series, which features pulp-noir plots in modern settings. His narrator investigates the death of his friend and occasional lover Dorrie, a Columbia student with a (relatively) secret life. The police deem it a suicide, but John Blake knows it can’t be, because she didn’t destroy all the evidence of that secret life. His investigation turns deadly for several people, and the resolution slotted all the earlier clues grimly into place. Doing a noir plot in an age when people are ashamed of a lot less than they used to be is difficult, but Aleas pulls it off. He also incorporates cellphones and email into the plot, which in classic form often depended on inaccessibility at crucial moments; it’s interesting just to see how constant accessibility and the ever-present possibility of surveillance change the characters’ interactions even as they play out the old roles.
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight: This was the wrong book at the wrong time for me. Seventeen-year-old Bella moves from Arizona to dreary Washington to give her flighty mother a chance at happiness, and falls in love with the infuriating Edward. When he saves her life from a freak accident, she quickly realizes that there’s more to him than stunning gorgeousness – and he feels the same way about her. Why? That’s a good question. She’s beautiful (though she doesn’t know/believe it), she smells good (uniquely good to him, but also good to others of his kind), and for some unknown reason he can’t read her mind, as he can read everyone else in the world. The relationship is incredibly unequal because Edward has special powers and Bella’s only power is her power to attract him, which just doesn’t cancel out the rest. To her credit, Bella realizes this, but not in time to make her likable.
The basic problem is that Bella is entirely defined by the fact that she’s irresistable to Edward. If she were other than a collection of traits (prickliness, clumsiness, attractiveness) that exist only in relation to their effect on him, I could forgive the emo switches from misery to joy and back again on each page. It’s realistic for a teen, but made me roll my eyes the fiftieth time she went from angry to love-dazed in two lines. Bella narrates that she pays no attention in school, so consumed is she with her love life, and yet she doesn’t fail a single class. That’s a minor annoyance, but it is typical – she never brought me inside her obsession, and so I found the story boring and overdramatized.
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