The best part of the book for me was that we get a long section from Jacob’s point of view and in his voice, which is a breath of fresh air and pretty funny to boot (check those chapter titles), and it made me wish once again that he were the hero of the series. It’s interesting that Meyer’s writing is liveliest when she’s writing in a young man’s voice — probably because she has so many brothers she clearly adores. Unfortunately, basically what he does is angst over Bella (who is so not worth it) and then eventually have his romantic thread neatly tied up in a somewhat pervy and unsatisfying way. Its bizarreness is offset by the fact that I think no love triangle has ever been resolved in this fashion, at least not in any book you can buy at Target.

I started writing this right after I finished the book and left it incomplete until now, so I don’t have a lot of ambition left to analyze the flaws of this novel or the series in general. At this moment we’re all watching teenage and “tween” girls everywhere hit puberty from the one-two punch of the fictional Edward and the actor playing him in the movie that’s about to open, and marveling at the mania that’s developed around these wish-fulfillment novels. Because that’s what they are. The pain Bella goes through is described in great detail, but it’s hard to imagine for most lucky readers, and her pleasures quickly take precedence in our fantasies: an inexhaustible demon lover, a brand-new baby who will never need its diaper changed (liquid diet, but also it’s way precocious), a super-mutant-power that saves the day, even a fairytale cottage in the woods (not my cup of tea — I’m more of a Frank Lloyd Wright kinda guy). Harry Potter has this kind of thing too — poor orphan discovers he’s an awesome wizard and goes to an awesome school where every attempt on his life ultimately fails — and it’s more universal in its appeal, but also less horny, so maybe it balances out.

Ultimately I find it hard to respect this series, but not just because of its insidious appeal and startlingly dodgy gender politics. It’s also a problem of missed opportunities. Here are just a few.

1. Edward and Bella “magically” fall in love. Why? She smells good, and he’s gorgeous and saves her life several times. This is so easy and so boring. I’ve never read a Jane Austen novel but I’m pretty sure they don’t work this way; from what I understand her heroines take the whole novel to fall in love, and they do it the way the rest of us do: slowly, making mistakes, building on real chemistry and the things people have in common, not on love-at-first-sight/destiny tropes. Wouldn’t the romance have been that much cooler if the 100-year-old vampire and his 17-year-old girlfriend slowly discovered that they liked doing the same things, reading the same authors, that kind of stuff? We get hints of this, but only later on. Meanwhile in New Moon Bella and Jacob fall in love in exactly this way, the natural human way. It would have been so much more compelling if Bella and Edward had done the same, and her conflict would have seemed so much more real.

2. Edward is over ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. He was around for Vietnam, Korea, WW2, WW1, and the conflicts before that. He unlived through the Depression. He probably met Jimi Hendrix, or could have, not to mention Oscar Wilde. This guy has got to have some incredibly interesting stories to tell, even if he couldn’t get too close to humans during these historical events. Hell, other members of his “family” are even older. Yet NOT ONCE DURING THE WHOLE SERIES can I recall any of them actually making reference to history or giving any real indication that they are this old. I’m not even that into history and even I think this would be one of the coolest things about being undead: you don’t have to age and yet you get to watch eras go by and see things change, forever. Bella doesn’t seem to have that many intellectual interests beyond 19th-century fiction, but you would think that she would have some marginal interest in grilling her boyfriend about the times he’s lived through, if only to help her pass Social Studies. But neither she nor Meyer shows the slightest curiosity about this.

3. The great unexplored story of vampires vs. werewolves — as Meyer portrays them — is class conflict. On one side: the rich whiteys sucking the blood of the land and the people, so rich they can afford to throw away designer clothes after one wearing*, no responsibilities other than keeping the casualties discreet so that no one realizes how deadly they are. On the other side: the poor native tribe, scratching out a living on the reservation, barely able to afford clothes (granted, it’s because they keep wolfing out and ripping them, but still), fixing up old cars for their joyrides and doing their best to defend their land and keep the leeches off it. Maybe you’re thinking “who wants to read all this sociopolitical stuff in a teen vampire romance?” but look, it’s right there in black and white — I didn’t make it up. Even if you narrow it down to the rich preppy boyfriend vs. the grungy biker rival, this is classic romance narrative, and the class element is an integral part of it as the heroine decides whether to be true to her roots (or maybe her libido) or strive for upward mobility. At barest minimum, this is something basic and real that Meyer’s readers could probably relate to, but no one talks about it. I suspect one reason why is that Jacob’s side of the argument would sound too good, and poor Jacob is not allowed to win.

*This, by the way, is why I don’t like Alice as much as I’m supposed to. Not only does her greatest pleasure in life seem to be dressing up Bella like a Barbie doll, she is the chief instigator of this incredibly wasteful consumerist lifestyle the vamps lead. I don’t think you have to be a commie to find that pretty distasteful.

This also begins the devolution of Charlie, Bella’s increasingly irrelevant father. He’s been underused all along — a police chief who mostly spends his time watching ESPN or eating Bella’s cooking as opposed to, say, being called away in the middle of the night by police emergencies. I get that Forks is a quiet town, but come on! Why make him a police chief? If he’d been an insurance salesman it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Meanwhile he mainly exists to hate Edward and love Jacob (I empathize, but still) even when Jacob all but rapes his daughter.

When I first realized that we had rich, white, repressed, reserved vampires in a shaky truce with poor, native American, hotheaded, lively werewolves, I saw a perfect opportunity for Meyer to bring class and race into her romantic/supernatural conflict. Unfortunately that opportunity is totally missed. Not that I expected or wanted her to make it political, but at minimum this contrast could have added a healthy dose of flavor to the story. Instead no one in the story seems to find it the least bit unseemly that the Cullens are rich enough to buy the kinds of cars druglords own and stock their closets with designer clothes they wear only once and throw away (no kidding). These undead people are filthy fucking rich, nakedly consumerist, and flagrantly wasteful, and this is just considered glamorous. In some ways this is the most offensive element of the books to me.

Of course, there’s plenty more to be offended by, if you’re looking for it. The werewolf imprinting, for example, means that they fall in love at first sight (the men do, and the women just love being smothered with affection so much that they fall in love back), and in some cases this means falling in love with much younger women. Do I mean sixteen, fourteen, twelve? No, I mean TWO. Bella is of course shocked when this happens, but Meyer takes pains to explain that the werewolves (who, like vampires, don’t age normally) have the decency to wait until their toddler beloveds are old enough before brotherly love turns into lust (but no word on what age this actually is). It’s probably a double standard I hold that I’d find this intensely creepy in a male author but in a female author I just find it hilarious, and even a little admirable that she gets away with it in a book for young adults.

The thing is, he’s more Bella’s type too, in that they actually have some ordinary human chemistry, a solid relationship based on how much they enjoy spending time together, in sharp contrast to “we’re just in love, okay? don’t question it” Bella + Edward. The vampire twit was out of the picture for most of the novel, which was great, except that Bella moped about him for most of the novel, which wasn’t. I wasn’t keen on the creation of a love triangle, but it could have been interesting if we’d been able to believe for one moment that Bella might have second thoughts about being with Edward. Unfortunately she’s not allowed to, so there’s no real conflict or suspense.

This novel also introduces Meyer’s vampire elders, the Volturi. They’re pretty corny. The conceit that they could exterminate an entire tour group without anyone noticing is hilarious.

This was the point in the series where I was surprised to find that, after many years of being into vampires, I suddenly started to find werewolves a lot more appealing.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight shows us vampires who in some ways have it even better. These cats can go out in the sun anytime they like — as long as nobody’s watching, because their skin sparkles like diamonds in it, which is kind of a giveaway. Like Rice’s Louis, the vampire protagonists have a conscience, and they strenuously avoid killing humans, to the dismay and detriment of the wildlife in the lush Washington forest they live near. Like Rice’s Lestat, they’re rich as Midas and seem to possess additional psychic talents such as telepathy, precognition, and a sort of empathic projection.

But they’re neither antiheroes nor übermensch libertines. They’re socially responsible, staunchly heterosexual, and one of them is in love with Our Heroine.

I love my antiheroes and libertines but that’s no way for a nice Mormon girl to write about vampires. It certainly creates immediate, potent conflict to have vampires struggling with their predatory natures (mostly stoically, unlike whining Louis), and since a vampire is basically a serial killer who does it for food, not pleasure, you have to make them sympathetic somehow. So I’m cool with her take on the subject.

I have to say, though, that it’s the nicer side of a phenomenon that makes me a little queasy these days, which is the savage killer using his or her powers for good. The most prominent example is a show I admit I’ve never watched and might find fairly entertaining: Dexter, the serial killer vigilante on Showtime. He seems partially inspired by what happened to Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s novels and the films made from them. In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter’s helpful but clearly evil, unambiguously ruthless. In Hannibal we’re meant to despise his victims — instead of hapless policemen doing their jobs, they’re out to get him or they’re sexist, nasty FBI agents, so clearly he has no choice, right? And in Hannibal Rising, with one exception, he’s just getting revenge against the evil men who destroyed his childhood and murdered his sister. There’s something about the way we turn killers into heroes — instead of recognizing their villainy even if we take a macabre pleasure in its excess — that seems disturbing to me.

Twilight isn’t really about vampires or murderers so much as high school romance. Here’s how it works. A girl moves to a small town where she discovers to her amazement that she’s relatively hot and desirable. Every guy asks her out but she puts them off, intrigued by the one guy who seems to hate her guts and yet saves her life. Eventually it turns out he only seems to hate her because — I’m really not spoiling this for you — he’s a vampire, and her scent is almost irresistible. It’s not clear whether he loves her because she smells so good or if the two just happen to coincide or what. He is just thoroughly in love with her despite hardly knowing her and yet he’s forbidden to love her because that enticing scent makes him want to kill her.

She loves him, of course, because he is godlike in his beauty (as we are told in so many words several times) and also his nigh-omniscience (he reads minds) and nigh-omnipotence (he runs almost as fast as he drives, can stop a car with one hand, and hunts wild animals without guns). Also he is an older man, around five times her age, though of course he looks seventeen, which is a good deal if you can get it.

This is how a lot of teenage romance works, it’s true: hormones, pheromones, and pretty faces. But I don’t think it would have killed Meyer to give these two a little prosaic chemistry. Our heroine Bella doesn’t seem to have a lot of hobbies or conversation, though she seems to like music, and her undead beau Edward has had decades to master piano composition and performance, so that helps. Still, it’s hard to root for a romance where the two seem to have so little in common, where the magnetic forces are Edward’s preternatural beauty and Bella’s improbably delicious blood.

Fortunately the prose is lively and charming enough to entertain over the course of 500-plus quick-reading pages. The setting is vivid and full of character; I really want to visit the lush Washington forest myself now. Edward’s vampire family is colorful and interesting, and all of them are falling over themselves trying not to lose control and murder Bella, which is weird and fun. There’s even a local native tribe, the Quileute, who know Edward and his family are vampires, which starts to become central to the plot in the second book (I’m 300 pages into that one) and gets very interesting indeed.

I’m actually rooting for Quileute boy Jacob Black to become a viable romantic rival to Edward; he’s much sweeter and has a lot more personality. The thing with Edward is that most of his scenes with Bella involve him either struggling to make out with her and not give in to the temptation to kill her (which you can read as: he’s trying not to take her virginity, or his for that matter — yeah, he’s been a vampire for the better part of a century and has never fallen in love before…uh huh), or else being kind of an asshole because he’s worried about killing her or about some other vampire killing her. “I shouldn’t be with you…it’s not safe,” that kind of thing. “You should go live your life — I’m wrong for you.” Blah blah blah. It’s really kind of a drag. Even after we find out that Jacob has some secrets of his own (which of course we see coming from the minute we meet him), he’s still more appealing in my book. The two of them have fun together. They’re best friends, and there’s clearly an attraction. If it weren’t for Vampire Superman, who knows?

Anyway. I’m looking forward to the movie, not because I think it’ll be amazing (doubt it) but because I think it’ll be entertaining, which is the same reason I like the books. The only drawback is that I can skim the romance in the books, and in the movie theater I’ll have to sit through it.

Since that moment his novels have been slowly traveling back through time. After Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive finished off the trilogy begun with Neuromancer, his next three novels (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties) seemed to move to a nearer future, a grungier world of crumbling architecture, the old giving way to the new. Wealth still seemed consumer-derived, goods weren’t entirely disposable, jobs and profit schemes seemed more desperate and difficult. To be honest, I found those books duller; they seemed less urgent and more interested in the scenery than the road. It wasn’t a change in nature so much as degree, and while I enjoyed the scenery I didn’t find it nearly as spectacular, just well-observed and clever.

Then came Pattern Recognition, which was set (like the quintessentially Gibsonian TV series Max Headroom) 20 minutes into the future. Despite the plot turning on a particularly silly MacGuffin — in this case, a set of short video clips released randomly on the internet, leading to an underground craze for piecing them together and analyzing them — I really enjoyed that one. My favorite element was the protagonist’s hypersensitivity to branding, which left her unable to wear anything but the most generic, monochromatic clothing and then only after cutting out the tags and logos.

I expected his latest novel, Spook Country, to be just as appealing. It’s set in the same universe, ours, but in the portion of it run by the very rich and cosmopolitan and culturally au courant. It’s got the same structure, in which a skilled freelancer (in this case, a rock star turned journalist) is employed to seek a MacGuffin so MacGuffiny it’s cited as an example in the Wikipedia article on MacGuffins.

This time Gibson seems less interested in internet memes and more interested in geocoding and post-9/11 sociopolitics, so really a lateral move in terms of lameness (just typing the phrase “post-9/11″ makes me want to throw up). Luckily this is William Gibson, so if anybody can make these topics seem freshly interesting, he can.

Apparently nobody can. An overt political statement would have been gauche and out of character, but apart from a character’s casual, astute thought that another character seemed to have stepped out of a past era when the world was “run by grownups,” any direct observations are too subtle to register. We have a DEA agent dragging an addict around with him to do translation work and help him steal firearms from drug dealers when necessary, but if this plotline went somewhere I missed it when I looked away for a second. The geocoding/”locative art” stuff is cute for a second or two (example: with the headset on, you can stand outside the Viper Room and see River Phoenix’s body in virtual reality) but mostly serves as a bridge to the MacGuffin for the rather dull rockstar protagonist. Then there’s a family of Cuban-Chinese urban guerillas smuggling iPods loaded with secret information and doing Russian martial arts and channeling some sort of voodoo loa as they dance ever closer to the MacGuffin. It’s colorful, but what does it all mean?

No one really changes over the course of the story, except perhaps the addict, who finds some clarity and a new life. The rocker/journalist is basically just a camera (the way I suspected a certain object she kept carrying around with her would turn out to be, but it was never clearly explained) and people improbably take her along on missions they have little reason to trust her with. There’s no real payoff even with the MacGuffin. It’s a finely written novel, but if it goes anywhere at all, it does so with way too much subtlety for me to detect. It’s frustrating and a bit of a letdown.

Gibson has always combined a sense of razor-sharp cultural observation with an elegant understatement, and when he was writing about the future it always seemed sufficient for us to ride along with him, face pressed to the windows, marveling at the sights without caring where the train took us in the end. Now that he’s concerned with the present, and is largely showing us what we know or know of, I find myself yearning for a destination or even just a more informative tour guide.