The Vampire's Coffee House

One of the things I really missed in Long Island -- and have reveled in while being back in Austin -- is bakery-cafes. Other than the little place in Oyster Bay that I mentioned last time, the North Shore of Long Island offers expensive dining establishments at one end and Starbucks at the other, with little in between. The local economics don’t seem to permit a place to sit while indolently munching on a croissant. The delis are similarly table-free.

So, yeah, during my week at home, I've spent a fair amount of time at Mozart's and Upper Crust. I had the intention, when I so abruptly booked the flight back home, of organizing a few belongings. Truly, it makes me happy to put old things in new places and call it an improvement (it was the third time I moved the cutlery that Mike threatened homicide). But one night of lying in my old bed made me less ambitious. I started thinking how nice it would be to not take care of anybody. We've had many family trips over the years, some of them spectacular -- like my 50th birthday trip to Britain -- but it's rare that I or any full-time mom has a vacation where she isn't looking after anyone. The vacations we can typically afford involve me and a kitchen.

So as soon as my kid departed to north Texas with her friend, I started the endless grueling regimen: ride bike, bathe in jacuzzi, visit Mozart's, back home for a bit of internet surfing courtesy of my neighbor's unsecured wi-fi, then watch a movie while torturing yarn (one sock finished!). Despite all this opulent time-wasting, I've found one way in which I can still be a good mommy, even though Jesse is far away. I've been reading a book that she was lukewarm about but which she wanted me to read because “all the girls” were reading it these days. It has vampires, she told me. And didn’t you write horror fiction once, Mommy? When Mr. Taft was still in office?

While I'm not the kind of mum who feels obliged to dog her offspring’s literary footsteps, it did seem that my kid was trying to haul me out of the mire of unfashionability. So I decided to meet her halfway, by reading Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer.

Let me repeat with obnoxious parental pride that my kid was lukewarm about this book. She liked the ending, but thought the heroine a simpleton. Twilight, as a tale of teen-meets-vampire is not bad, if you set the bar so low the dogs can’t dig it back up. And I say this as someone who often likes popular fiction. I read Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. I feel appropriate awe at their skills and don't begrudge them a penny in their bank accounts. Twilight is so mediocre I can’t bestir myself to take the novel itself seriously. But that leaves the vexing question of the novel’s popularity.

Sometimes, a writer can tap into a fantasy so profound that mere competence and a tiny bit of innovation is all that's called for. Remember The Bridges of Madison County, a dreadful read that nonetheless effectively mined every mother’s fantasy of glorious and noble self-sacrifice. At its core, Twilight is every bodice-ripper you’ve ever read or heard of, even if no bodices actually get ripped. The story is classic: a little nothing of a heroine, in whose rib-cage beats the heart of a lioness, meets the equivalent of the lord of the manor -- in this case a divinely hot vampire who’s passing for human in senior high. Edward, isn’t just hot, he’s the guy you’d kick Adonis out of bed for. Whenever he looms, the heroine’s heart beats quicker (let’s just call her Polly because she’s so vacuous I can never remember her name). It would appear that Polly is having urges of a non-spiritual nature.

But if Twilight were just a bodice ripper dressed up with some internally consistent fictions about vampires, it would maybe net an $8,000 advance and a 3-week tour on the bookshelves before dying among the remainders. Clearly something else is going on.

If you read the gushing Amazon commentary, it would appear at first glance that the draw for Twilight is just Edward himself. Every chapter dwells longingly and lovingly on the muscles in his chest, his marble skin, his weirdly alternating eye coloration (which would suggest corneal cancer to me but those teachers in high-school don’t seem to be alarmed). Edward is so much the scene stealer, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Twilight’s biggest fans are unable to remember Polly’s real name, too. It’s all Edward, all the time. He’s so gorgeous that in bright sunlight he actually sparkles.

(By the way, the sparkle means that Edward has to live in dim places. Cloudy places. Northern places. Sometimes, even cloudy and northern places. I think Meyer was trying to make some point about northern light being weaker than equatorial light. Fortunately, she caught herself before she might actually have to commit to a real-world fact, like the planet being tilted on its axis and revolving around the sun. I don’t think Meyers much cares for a mechanical view of the universe, and it shows).

Edward may be bonny but he has some very particular ways in which he is not a normal man and I think its these traits that have so beguiled the Twilight series’ adoring fans. First, there’s the way Edward fell in love with out heroine. Being without equal in beauty, and being decades old, urbane and knowledgeable, whatever would he see in the guileless and under-achieving Polly? Your ordinary bodice-ripper has to resort to some pretty fancy foot-work in order to persuade the reader that His Lordship would fall for the homely governess. In the vampire myth, Meyer has found a sledgehammer to crack that particular nut. She posits that vampire aesthetics are not the same as human aesthetics. Edward, we’re told, is very sensitive to smells and the heroine smells really, really good to him. Her scent, her fragrance – pick any olfactorial noun you like but “odor” -- has made him have feelings that are, well, of a non-spiritual kind. These feelings are notably involuntary and unconditional.

And Edward’s love is complicated by another invention of Meyer’s. Have you ever fallen in love and then awakened one day, a few weeks or months later, only to realize that the boy of your dreams is really a boob? What once seemed like his barely controllable passion for you now looks like the incessant pestering of someone who, just as your mother always warned you, has only one thing on his mind. That was great when you also had only one thing on your mind. But now you’ve moved on. And he’s a jerk. Well, Edward will never do that to Polly, not only because of the involuntary nature of his love -- it’s just a sniff thing -- but because his love must be chaste. You think Ironman is strong, but that’s nothing compared to Edward’s speed and ferocity. And just as Edward has no control over his taste for Polly’s scent, he can’t claim much control over his own strength. It seems that vampires, while licking the sweat off your brow, can accidentally put a tongue through your brain. It's all fun until someone puts out an eye. Our chiseled male vampire and our squishy female human will have to confine themselves to some pretty ginger cuddling. Forever.

And another thing about Edward’s love: it’s very, very protective. There’s a long paragraph, not long after he and Polly have declared their undying devotion, where the ever-clueless Polly, when confronted with a complicated seat-belt in Edward’s SUV, gives up trying to strap herself in (Polly is truly an idiot). Anyway, Edward, with the barest hint of tender exasperation, reaches over and buckles his girl in, tightly constraining her for the journey ahead: remind you of anything? If you’ve had a baby and then a toddler in your life, the image of the car-seat will be all too familiar. Thus we have a boyfriend whose love is more like that of a father: involuntary, unconditional, chaste and all-protective. And the innocent Polly is apparently not a near-woman in late adolescence, but a baby.

This novel is anything but the coming-of-age story that is at the heart of the best Young Adult novels. Twilight is instead the anti-Harry Potter. Rather than learning to grow in skill and in mastery of herself, Polly swoons into the arms of the most appalling regression fantasy.

It’s certainly understandable why the young women of today might want Twilight’s vacation from a hyper-sexualized culture. But not every vacation is healthy. When I was young, I was told that sex without benefit of clergy imperils the immortal soul, which meant that any girl -- funny how the focus was always on girls -- who succumbs to passion was basically killing herself, marking her soul for the clutches of Beelzebub. The message was very plain: have sex and you die! Meyers, in setting up a fictional universe where this is literally true, isn’t doing her young readers any favors. While Twilight might promote under-age chastity by raising a girl’s standards -- after Edward, that pimply, satchel-fannied dweeb plucking away at Guitar Hero is going to look pretty pathetic -- it says nothing about the basic merits of just growing up, of learning to say no not because Daddy wants it or because you fear the clutches of the Horned One, but because you’re a human being with goals, goals that can be put at risk by drugs, drink, or hormones, toxic ideologies or superstitious creeds. Poor Polly. Perpetual psychological infancy may ensure perpetual abstinence, but I think she pays too high a price.