As Jonathan noted above, the last novel lacked the typical conflict/climax leading to either Bella’s marriage or Bella’s death. Instead, it was several hundred pages of pay-off, that is, Bella herself finally having all of the capabilities that she longed for and making use them. It made the novel feel a bit self-indulgent at time, and Bella’s avoidance of the typical newbie vampire madness seemed a bit of a cheat (or at least convenient hand-waving). On the other hand, it makes for an underlying message of, “Wait and do things in the proper order, and you can have a significant payoff”, which is not a bad message to be giving young women in today’s oversexed and casually-sexed society.

To the extent that you try to match up the vampiric state with LDS exaltation, you find Meyer raising a very interesting question. Bella — post-marriage, post-vampiric conversion — is thoroughly enjoying marital relations with Edward and observes at one point that since they never get tired, sore, or, uh, unable to perform, why wold they ever want or need to stop? Food for thought. ..bruce..

It’s the fact that she’s LDS that leads us to wonder about the congruence of her characters with Mormon morality. And it’s also true, isn’t it, that when some people discover a Mormon’s identity, they associate an expectation of morality with that Mormon which more or less overlaps with Mormonism’s actual standards, and are shocked when we deviate from the perceived standard. (I think, for instance, of the horror-genre stories and early fantasy novels by Orson Scott Card. I pointed out that he’d penned the novelization of The Abyss to another Church member, for example, and the fact of his Church membership was simply not believed. Meyer doesn’t run that risk at all.

For example, Church leaders have stood up to say, “There is no ‘the One’ whom you are intended to marry,” but many Mormons cherish the romantic ideas depicted by Lex de Azevedo in his plays from about three decades ago. The same would be true about any Mormon ideas regarding the mechanisms which conceived Jesus Christ (or the ideas about that which are spread by many of the Church’s critics, for that matter.) We can find the ideas in the culture, but tracing them back to a specific supportable doctrine is dicier.

So if we look for Mormonism in Meyer’s book, we can certainly point to some of the automatic cultural assumptions she’d be making as an Intermountain Western Mormon, and could probably match many of them to the specific peculiarities of Arizona Mormons. (It’s only in Arizona that I’ve heard a man, for example, intone his prayers in precisely the same voice as the narrator in one of the Church videos from the late 80′s, and lemme tellya, I thought it was plenty strange to hear that…)

So, yeah… no allegory, and I think not even the unintentional allegories such as are found in the Narnia books. But I *did* think of the Cullens as Mormon vampires! People of a certain type leading a very minority lifestyle, abstaining from certain foods and many of the crimes of their kind, living lives devoted to service, but with great cars, great family-centered material wealth, and a distinct long-term profit motive to support that life? All while living eternally with a spouse of their mutual choice, forsaking all others, but otherwise more or less blending in with the larger population, maintaining a reasonably affable relationship with some neighbors and tolerating deep seated prejudices from others, *and* hiding the strangest parts of their lives from public view?

Yup. Mormon Vampires. Hard to miss from the inside, ain’t it?

Rob Perkins, I appreciate your comments. It is true that we could point out differences between life as vegetarian vampires and the Celestial Kingdom, such as the expected absence of snacking on wayward moose and other game animals, but I think we can steer around them easily enough by saying that Breaking Dawn is a novelistic reworking of one specific aspect (but an important one!) of the Mormon afterlife, rather than an allegory intended to reflect all of them. The one child of Bella and Edward is more important as a sign of human sociality continuing into the next life than as a numerical limit.

Kylie, the union of immortal father and human mother does stand out, doesn’t it? Our reluctance to pin down exactly what the virgin birth consisted of makes it a bit hard to say just what a Mormon-vampire interpretation of the virgin birth should consist of, unfortunately. Then again, the mortal/immortal offspring of Edward and Bella does seem destined to marry her foreordained partner, so maybe there is the possibility of a specifically Mormon reading after all.

Julie, sorry for the confusion. But perhaps you or anyone else who stumbles over Stephenie Meyer’s prose could help me out. After reading 3500 pages or so of her writing, I just don’t remember coming across any truly horrible sentences. Edward’s smooth granite skin got a bit repetitive from time to time, but I don’t recall ever telling myself that a particular bit of writing stunk. And I often do take note of things like that, sometimes with red pen in hand. I can’t say that the prose is flawless or breathtaking, but I thought it got the job done and it didn’t get in the way of the story. So help me out. Could someone give me some specific examples of sentences that just don’t work? I don’t intend to argue about it, but at this point I’m really not sure what kinds of things other people find so problematic about the prose.

You had said, “There are more skills required in novel writing than word- and sentence-level ones. Stephenie Meyer is good at some things, and very good at other things.”

. . . and I guess I remembered it incorrectly.