Stephanie Meyers' tween-hit novel Twilight breaks every literary commandment preached on the first day of Creative Writing Workshop 101:  "Thou shalt not commit clichés."  "Thou shalt not pen in platitudes."  "Thou shalt not write saccrine romances about impossibly beautiful teen vampires and insecure mortal heroines who don't know how beautiful they are and therefore evoke greater empathy from their female fan base." And, if we were in Creative Writing Workshop 102: "Thou shalt not use impossibly beautiful teen vampires and their courtship of mortal heroines as a coy mechanism to teach tweens and teeens how to abstain from sex until marriage."  Here you may want to give Meyers a few points for subversivenessness -- after all, what is more counterintuitive than a Mormon in vampire's clothing -- but a chaste vampire hottie does take a few teeth out of the erotically saturated genre of vampire fiction -- even if it is vampire fiction PG. Or perhaps G -- Bella and Edward, our Beauty and the Deceased, only get as far as first base.  Edward may be a vampire, but he is also made in his author's own very Christian image.

    Believe it or not, I'm about to get more positive. Because if we look beyond the margins of the opening paragraph you'll notice little ol' me, deeply absorbed in a just purchased but already ravaged paperback copy of... Twilight.  Moreover, it got into that ravaged state in the unlikeliest of places: Madison Square Garden. Amongst a crowd of bloodthirsty, college sports fans during one of the biggest college basketball championships of the year, no less, and, in spite of the fact that my nose was deeply and anashamedly (well, okay maybe a little ashemedly) in that book he crowd is too immersed in the UCLA-Michigan spectacle to notice what was, frankly, my own little spectacle. I should take a moment to point out that actually like basketball.  A lot. To put it bluntly -- I couldn't put the book down and I didn't want to.

  "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is one of the oldest clichés in the book, and, in the case of Twilight, the best way to describe the alchemy that gives momentum to a set of characters and circumstances that earn credibility and then vitality. Something about all the horrible bits coming together somehow makes for a wonderful book, like a delicious stew made of leftovers you would otherwise put in the trash.  My date at the basketball game laughed while peering over my shoulder, marveling over the sentimentality of each paragraph.  In fact, if he or I were to turn at random to any sentence and read it aloud we would find the same clichés that we're all warned about in that Creative Writing 101 workshop, rendering his falsetto soprano mimicry unnecessary to get the point across. Twilight judged for its parts in fact merits a review much worse than the first paragraph of this one. The critic is tempted to return to the book to search for Meyers' wild card, the invisible component that builds a genuinely evocative romantic narrative on a flimsy deck of a house of cards.  In this way, the critic wouldn't be dissimilar to the artist who searches for the underlying truth of beauty in a classically stunning woman's set of ridiculous, caricaturish features.

   Sometimes it helps both critic and artist to understand the original more by looking at something so similar that it could be its twin, but different enough that it acts as a foil.  Without being aware that I was getting ready to do just that I found myself immersed in an audience of  12 to 16 year old girls, a crowd just as hardcore as any testosterone saturated sports arena, at the opening night of Twilight the film -- just one day after beginning (and finishing!) the book.  As the lights dim I began to feel as if I was revisiting places that I have just left -- even the seating arrangements in the science lab where Edward and Bella met are strikingly similar to how I had envisioned them the night before when reading the book.  But while each scene presents itself as a near twin to its novelistic fragment, the scenes failed to build on one another as the movie progressed.  While perfectly translating the book scene by scene, Twilight the film is not an essential translation, and is dead on arrival in spite of decent performances by its two leads, Kristen Stewart (Bella) and Robert Pattinson (Edward).

   As I stood on the long restroom line with my equally disappointed (and at the time closeted) Twilight book fanatical friends I kept returning to the obsessive "why" of the difference between the book and the film-- the why that kept me completely oblivious to my favorite sport and the why that had almost just led me into my own eternal sleep in the movie theater.

  Meyers, like her undead hero, had plenty of time -- and hundreds of pages -- to court and woo her readership.  But in the movie you are missing all the mundane details that take you from each questionably written fragment to the next.  The melodramatic text in the book easily overshadows the bland details that the critic at first overlooks -- namely, simple statements implying the passage of time from one day to the next.  In contrast to the film, where the the protagonists seem to have developed love and trust within a matter of celluloid seconds, Bella and Edward take their time over the course of Meyers' voluminous text to develop their bond.  Bella also takes her time to develop a bond with Edward's vampire family, a compelling aspect of the book that gets lost in the film's translation.

   That, and maybe Edward is onto something when he talks about a soul.  At least in this case, a soul from Meyers' somehow-brilliant-even-though-it-s-made-from-recycled-pieces-of-turd novel that the movie production failed to resurrect along with her vampire clan in this Tween-kie production.

 Twilight the film is Twilight the book after you've taken it out on not enough sleep, a lousy day, and too many drinks. Twilight the book is a compelling flirtation, while Twilight the movie flops as even a one night stand.

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