I agree that "making the reader care" is the most important thing, and the lack of that is not a particular flaw of Powers' opening. There's no reason not to be intrigued by this father and daughter playing chess, and my interest in them only started to leak away when the father started emitting his expositorily lumpy dialogue.
Certainly a bullets-flying action scene would have been worse, especially if it served only as a crust introducing calmer waters. One could see the movie Memento (in which the hero at times finds himself, for instance, running down the street with bullets flying after him, with no idea who he's running from or why) as a parody of this sort of thing.
Forgetting to make the reader care is a common problem of expository introductions, and if those were common, with the attendant flaws, I'd be complaining about those instead. I'm an equal-opportunity grump. It does occur a lot in summaries of stories, which often begin with explaining the background that the author carefully stitched together over the course of the story. Any summary of The Sandman that begins "There are nine siblings called the Endless" (a fact that the reader doesn't learn until volume 4) or any retelling of The Lord of the Rings that begins by recounting the back-history of the Ring instead of introducing you to Frodo and then letting Gandalf tell him about it (one P. Jackson does this) suffers from this problem.
The cinematic nature of Powers', and many many other lesser writers', writing comes less in the "seeing" per se than in the limitations, particularly on seeing. If the author imagines the reader as physically present at the scene of the action, the then the description will include not just the other senses - in this case, is the room musty, perhaps? Is it warm or cold? That sort of thing - but also a full visual sense of the environs. If a seeing person (and I bet maybe even a blind person) is in a room, you have an immediate and full sense of the size of the room, who and what is in it, the entirety of your surroundings. Powers doesn't do that. All that the first sentence shows is the one chess piece, and the square it's being put on, not even the rest of the board, let alone the players, let alone the room they're in. That's not a novel letting the reader be there. That's a movie director putting the camera's tight focus on the chess piece, not letting the viewer see anything else. That's a cinematic technique, not a novelistic technique.
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Date: 2013-03-15 01:29 pm (UTC)Certainly a bullets-flying action scene would have been worse, especially if it served only as a crust introducing calmer waters. One could see the movie Memento (in which the hero at times finds himself, for instance, running down the street with bullets flying after him, with no idea who he's running from or why) as a parody of this sort of thing.
Forgetting to make the reader care is a common problem of expository introductions, and if those were common, with the attendant flaws, I'd be complaining about those instead. I'm an equal-opportunity grump. It does occur a lot in summaries of stories, which often begin with explaining the background that the author carefully stitched together over the course of the story. Any summary of The Sandman that begins "There are nine siblings called the Endless" (a fact that the reader doesn't learn until volume 4) or any retelling of The Lord of the Rings that begins by recounting the back-history of the Ring instead of introducing you to Frodo and then letting Gandalf tell him about it (one P. Jackson does this) suffers from this problem.
The cinematic nature of Powers', and many many other lesser writers', writing comes less in the "seeing" per se than in the limitations, particularly on seeing. If the author imagines the reader as physically present at the scene of the action, the then the description will include not just the other senses - in this case, is the room musty, perhaps? Is it warm or cold? That sort of thing - but also a full visual sense of the environs. If a seeing person (and I bet maybe even a blind person) is in a room, you have an immediate and full sense of the size of the room, who and what is in it, the entirety of your surroundings. Powers doesn't do that. All that the first sentence shows is the one chess piece, and the square it's being put on, not even the rest of the board, let alone the players, let alone the room they're in. That's not a novel letting the reader be there. That's a movie director putting the camera's tight focus on the chess piece, not letting the viewer see anything else. That's a cinematic technique, not a novelistic technique.