Reading expectations-- Stephenie Meyer's vampire series
I made a mental note a couple of weeks ago that if I saw another whack or squee about Meyer's vampires and their princess, I'd put up a discussion topic. I may have even mentioned this elsewhere, because I have a vague memory of a follow-up comments saying oh lets!
I read the first one, Twilight, but haven't read any of the others. I thought the writer showed a lot of talent--even though I thought the main character a bit of a Mary Sue*> She is instantly popular at her new high school (something that most kids new to a school can only dream wistfully of) and she instantly draws the attention of a mysterious and gorgeous guy who is far more than he seems--though the guy has been there a long time and knows most of the locals by sight. Well, I can buy a Mary Sue if I like her, I still am a sucker for Cinderella stories when I'm in a tired mood. Even though I could pretty much call the plot turns, because I have been reading a very long time, this one kept me turning the pages to the end. I misread the last line, thought it indicated something that actually didn't happen, which caused me to consider the story complete in a bittersweet twist. When I found out there was a sequel--and that the ending I'd thought hadn't happened--I was afraid it would be pretty much a rehash of the first book, but with artificially raised, er, stakes, so I didn't read it.
If you take a look at the link above, you'll see that the book, though it's been out for a while, is number 40 just on Amazon, and it has almost two thousand reviews. This is a successful book. The reviews veer between rug-chewing hatred and passionate squee. Mostly praise.
Several have claimed that it's a bad book. What is a bad book? Can a bad book be successful? Many claimed Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to be a bad book. I couldn't get past the first few pages, it just seemed wooden to my eye. My spouse read it without any enjoyment to the end, for professionally related purposes, and said the history was typical anti-Catholic hoopla drawn from popular but not academic sources--he is no scholar of the period, but he named a number of howling errors. I asked if the story was any good, and he said it would have made a terrific short story--if someone else had written it. Yet millions of readers obviously flatly disagreed.
Our expectations of books can diverge so widely it can be difficult to find common ground. But here are a couple of observations: many readers fall out of a book when the arguments overcome the emotional content of the story. And conversely, many fall out of a story when the emotional content overcomes the arguments, or the sense.
Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy serves as an example of the first, for me--again, super successful. By the third book (to my eye) the ultra-sonic whine of Pullman's message was turned up so loud the characters had diminished to peeps and twitters**. As for the second, many scorn romance novels because right up front you know that the story is going to feature emotional content way out in front of everything else. Love conquers all, for ever and ever. Don't we wish, say scoffers, ignoring the fact that romance readers are actually aware that life doesn't work that way...which is one of the reasons we turn to fiction.
I think the idea part of the equation is an easy call--you are convinced or not by the ideas, or you're already in the choir, singing the message loud and hard. Woo, when I was in college, the profs were all about the "ideas" of novels, contemptuously dismissing character except as symbol for idea. How many papers did I have to grind out about the "relevance of the ideas to today's problems?" And the all-time fave at the end of the sixties, "Discuss the relevance of [Novel by White Male Writer] to existential thought." Yet subtle explorations of the emotional spectrum is a strong part of character, and many of us prefer character-driven stories.
If that's true, then, just like ideas, emotions have to be convincing. And like ideas, it's not so easy to call fair or foul, because readers' experience, both in life and in reading, varies so widely. For my own part, if there are high emotional stakes, but everything is solved with snickersnack ease and speed, I feel cheated. Many readers are okay with easy solutions, or will buy the the Greek Chorus of sidekicks all praising the protag for their brilliance in cutting the Gordian knot that had baffled everyone else, and will accept the protag's brilliance as given.
That's another trope that forces me out of a story: the Greek Chorus, or characters who are only there to hint to me how I'm supposed to be feeling about the protag (awe! fear! desire!). I lose interest in characters there as signposts, without any hint of individual personality or even a divergence in reaction.*** I skimmed past many scenes in the Harry Potters because, except for a couple of brief moments****, the stock characters stayed predictably stock, and although the magical stakes got bigger and wilder and scarier, the questions I hoped would be answered were never addressed. But then I wasn't Rowling's intended audience--my students were, and most of them loved the books. I discovered in discussion that my young readers seemed like knowing what to expect from a character, that was a feature, not a flaw. Crabbe and Goyle are always going to be jerks, and the young reader gleefully reads to see what their next mean trick will be--and how they will be thwarted. Laugh tracks are on sitcoms for a reason, after all--they seem to work to signal "This is funny!"--and like it or not, we all respond in greater or lesser degree to crowd mood.
Okay, enough of that. Anyway, if you're still with me, go ahead, tell me WHY you find the Meyer books bad or good. And yes, in specifics, so SPOILERS ARE ALLOWED--how else can we be specific? So if if you don't want spoilers, don't go past here.
______________________________
*Mary Sue in this instance being the most beautiful, most interesting, the center not just of attention but of everyone's lives, and not because we're shown how she got there, but we're told by the author. Like everything else, there are degrees of this handling--and not everyone will agree on the scale.
** Yet many found much in the series. I read this past winter a terrific fanfic by a very young author, based on Pullman's trilogy, which I thought was far more complex and interesting than Pullman's own writing, just because the characterizations were so well woven into the story matrix. For the curious, here's the link: http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/40/theivory.html
*** On a panel at Worldcon a couple years ago, one of the panelists in a talk about worldbuilding other cultures expressed roughly the same opinion. From the audience came the question, "What about aliens?" The panelist said something like: "I said characters, whether humans or giant cockroaches." With which I pretty much agree.
****Draco Malfoy in the penultimate book, and Dudley Dursley at the beginning of the last
I read the first one, Twilight, but haven't read any of the others. I thought the writer showed a lot of talent--even though I thought the main character a bit of a Mary Sue*> She is instantly popular at her new high school (something that most kids new to a school can only dream wistfully of) and she instantly draws the attention of a mysterious and gorgeous guy who is far more than he seems--though the guy has been there a long time and knows most of the locals by sight. Well, I can buy a Mary Sue if I like her, I still am a sucker for Cinderella stories when I'm in a tired mood. Even though I could pretty much call the plot turns, because I have been reading a very long time, this one kept me turning the pages to the end. I misread the last line, thought it indicated something that actually didn't happen, which caused me to consider the story complete in a bittersweet twist. When I found out there was a sequel--and that the ending I'd thought hadn't happened--I was afraid it would be pretty much a rehash of the first book, but with artificially raised, er, stakes, so I didn't read it.
If you take a look at the link above, you'll see that the book, though it's been out for a while, is number 40 just on Amazon, and it has almost two thousand reviews. This is a successful book. The reviews veer between rug-chewing hatred and passionate squee. Mostly praise.
Several have claimed that it's a bad book. What is a bad book? Can a bad book be successful? Many claimed Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to be a bad book. I couldn't get past the first few pages, it just seemed wooden to my eye. My spouse read it without any enjoyment to the end, for professionally related purposes, and said the history was typical anti-Catholic hoopla drawn from popular but not academic sources--he is no scholar of the period, but he named a number of howling errors. I asked if the story was any good, and he said it would have made a terrific short story--if someone else had written it. Yet millions of readers obviously flatly disagreed.
Our expectations of books can diverge so widely it can be difficult to find common ground. But here are a couple of observations: many readers fall out of a book when the arguments overcome the emotional content of the story. And conversely, many fall out of a story when the emotional content overcomes the arguments, or the sense.
Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy serves as an example of the first, for me--again, super successful. By the third book (to my eye) the ultra-sonic whine of Pullman's message was turned up so loud the characters had diminished to peeps and twitters**. As for the second, many scorn romance novels because right up front you know that the story is going to feature emotional content way out in front of everything else. Love conquers all, for ever and ever. Don't we wish, say scoffers, ignoring the fact that romance readers are actually aware that life doesn't work that way...which is one of the reasons we turn to fiction.
I think the idea part of the equation is an easy call--you are convinced or not by the ideas, or you're already in the choir, singing the message loud and hard. Woo, when I was in college, the profs were all about the "ideas" of novels, contemptuously dismissing character except as symbol for idea. How many papers did I have to grind out about the "relevance of the ideas to today's problems?" And the all-time fave at the end of the sixties, "Discuss the relevance of [Novel by White Male Writer] to existential thought." Yet subtle explorations of the emotional spectrum is a strong part of character, and many of us prefer character-driven stories.
If that's true, then, just like ideas, emotions have to be convincing. And like ideas, it's not so easy to call fair or foul, because readers' experience, both in life and in reading, varies so widely. For my own part, if there are high emotional stakes, but everything is solved with snickersnack ease and speed, I feel cheated. Many readers are okay with easy solutions, or will buy the the Greek Chorus of sidekicks all praising the protag for their brilliance in cutting the Gordian knot that had baffled everyone else, and will accept the protag's brilliance as given.
That's another trope that forces me out of a story: the Greek Chorus, or characters who are only there to hint to me how I'm supposed to be feeling about the protag (awe! fear! desire!). I lose interest in characters there as signposts, without any hint of individual personality or even a divergence in reaction.*** I skimmed past many scenes in the Harry Potters because, except for a couple of brief moments****, the stock characters stayed predictably stock, and although the magical stakes got bigger and wilder and scarier, the questions I hoped would be answered were never addressed. But then I wasn't Rowling's intended audience--my students were, and most of them loved the books. I discovered in discussion that my young readers seemed like knowing what to expect from a character, that was a feature, not a flaw. Crabbe and Goyle are always going to be jerks, and the young reader gleefully reads to see what their next mean trick will be--and how they will be thwarted. Laugh tracks are on sitcoms for a reason, after all--they seem to work to signal "This is funny!"--and like it or not, we all respond in greater or lesser degree to crowd mood.
Okay, enough of that. Anyway, if you're still with me, go ahead, tell me WHY you find the Meyer books bad or good. And yes, in specifics, so SPOILERS ARE ALLOWED--how else can we be specific? So if if you don't want spoilers, don't go past here.
______________________________
*Mary Sue in this instance being the most beautiful, most interesting, the center not just of attention but of everyone's lives, and not because we're shown how she got there, but we're told by the author. Like everything else, there are degrees of this handling--and not everyone will agree on the scale.
** Yet many found much in the series. I read this past winter a terrific fanfic by a very young author, based on Pullman's trilogy, which I thought was far more complex and interesting than Pullman's own writing, just because the characterizations were so well woven into the story matrix. For the curious, here's the link: http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/40/theivory.html
*** On a panel at Worldcon a couple years ago, one of the panelists in a talk about worldbuilding other cultures expressed roughly the same opinion. From the audience came the question, "What about aliens?" The panelist said something like: "I said characters, whether humans or giant cockroaches." With which I pretty much agree.
****Draco Malfoy in the penultimate book, and Dudley Dursley at the beginning of the last