Darn you one page authors

You Shall Know our Velocity by David Eggers begins

Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's north side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door.

Egger's book dramatically exceeds Siverson's. This is beautiful, the sentences move with both rhythm and simultaneity so that the experience is of absorbing instead of reading.

It continues

I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave. At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn't one of those days. I was pacing and Hand knew I was pacing and knew what it meant. I paced like this when figuring or planning, and rolled my knuckles, and snapped my fingers softly and without rhythm, and walked from the western edge of the apartment, where I would lock and unlock the front door, and then east, to the back deck's glass sliding door, which I opened quickly, thrust my head through and shut again. Hand could hear the quiet roar of the door moving back and forth on its rail, but said nothing.

I'm not sure there's anything wrong with the “quiet roar” and it didn't register the first time. This is still excellent and maybe a book can't sustain that opening for four hundred pages but there is a drop. The only problem is the graphical concealment. The first paragraph is the first page, “Everything” is "EVERYTHING".
I read the opening thinking that there was no debate, this was coming home with me. I took a quick glance at the second page but the second page was the second paragraph and in much smaller print. Complaining here is a bit much but I have troubles with this trend.
These are likely not marketing ploys. The argument could probably be made that the large size of the first page was symbolic- it indicated the text was different from the others. But two arguments about why this happens in general are worth taking a look at.

• This is where the effort naturally goes. The amount of thought that goes into beginning a book is necessarily large and the first sentences may represent the process of encapsulating all of it.
• The beginning is less involved with the business of the book. In this case after going through the setup Eggers had to introduce the characters, setting, action, and conflict; he had to get stuff done.