Absolute Power Book

David Baldacci's Absolute Power has a decent story, but it was hard for me to enjoy because I found the writing so hackneyed that it distracted me from the plot. Here's a representative descriptive passage:

At the sound of the explosion, the playing stopped as three pairs of eyes turned as one toward the house. In another minute they were inside. It only took one more minute for the screams to be heard. The quiet neighborhood was no more.

Forget, for a moment, the clumsy use of the passive voice in the first sentence, and focus instead on the bizarre description of three people as "three pairs of eyes." Not only is this unnecessary, it leads to the possibility of unintentional humor in the second sentence--"In another minute they were inside"--since one can interpret this as six disembodied eyes floating into the house. And the final sentence is terrible. Not only is it an unnecessary addition to the paragraph, it doesn't make logical sense. The quiet of the neighborhood may be disturbed, but the neighborhood itself still exists. Saying that "The quiet neighborhood was no more" makes it sounds as if the neighborhood has been incinerated by a hydrogen bomb.

Baldacci's dialogue is bad, too. Here's an example:

"Jack, do you have any idea who's behind all this?"

Jack shook his head, a small groan escaping his lips. "I've got a bunch of loose threads sliding around in my head but none of them have added up to spit so far. I'm hoping that status will change. Soon."

If there is any English-speaking person in the world who speaks that way while under duress, I have yet to meet them.

And here's one final example of exactly what I don't like about Baldacci's prose:

She still stood there several minutes after he left. A series of emotions competed for space across her face, none, in the end, winning out.

The unintentional rhyming of "space" with "face" is distracting. Also, Baldacci uses a lot of words to essentially tell the reader nothing. A character seems to experience a number of emotions--none of which are specifically described--before eventually experiencing none. Is that the idea Baldacci wishes to convey? Does he even know what idea he wishes to convey about his characters or the situations in which they find themselves most of the time? It didn't seem to me as if he did.

If you've seen previews for the film version of Absolute Power or read the flap copy, you know what it's about. I suppose it could be an enjoyable potboiler if you're able to turn off the critical part of your mind that notices clumsy writing and consume the story in the fashion one consumes an entire bag of chips in one sitting, but for me, the writing was so bad it was distracting. And trust me. I read some pretty bad books.